It's possible it just has a random defect like you said. My q3 had a battery failure and I didn't notice until it stopped working without the charger. RMA is really straightforward and nice about it.
I did that with the deck I received last October because the battery was broken and wouldn't perform under load. I've always treated my systems mobile and desktop as simple computers I can tinker with so personally I'm not bothered with using a different than stock os.
I prefer co op games anyway so there is no reason to be forced to opt into an anti cheat game but here we are.