This was their reasoning for kernels based anti-cheat:

Security

With every big update comes a renewed commitment from our Anti-Cheat team:

Cheat makers operate in a low-risk, high-reward world. They profit by selling cheats, oftentimes packing them with malware that harms their own customers, and they face very little consequences for their actions.  Meanwhile, players who use their cheats risk losing everything: their accounts, their money, their time, and their chance to participate in events and competitions. 

Our strategy for combating this is simple: raise the cost, difficulty, and time required to develop and distribute cheats. 

As mentioned in the 7.0 patch notes, a lot of cheats these days use a kernel-driver to read and write memory to gain an unfair advantage. This means that they run in a privileged mode in the Windows operating system, making it unlikely and in some cases impossible to detect via Anti-Cheat in the game client. The technical solution to combat this is kernel-driver Anti-Cheat. We believe that this is, and will be, a requirement for every competitive multiplayer game for the foreseeable future.

We’re also using machine learning to analyze player behavior, and we have been doing so since the launch of THE FINALS. Machine learning provides valuable insights, especially when detecting cheats such as aimbot usage.

In the coming months, we will also begin an incremental rollout of a new kernel-based anti-cheat solution, intended to significantly raise the bar for cheat makers. 

Cheat makers exploit everyone: players, developers, and the community itself. We’re committed to protecting fair play and adapting to new threats. 

Despite claims from cheat developers that they’re “undetectable,” every cheat leaves breadcrumbs and we’ve been following them. Closely.