I think this is a technique from MMOs and other games with player ran economies that just got translated to modern games that have weird pseudo-economies
You ban the people cheating in an mmo because there's second and third order consequences from the disruption those people cause, which isn't present in a game like Battlefield. But developers are incentivized to include those systems to protect their micrtransaction cash store, so they just copy the system from World of Warcraft
But WoWs system isn't designed to improve individual player experience it was designed to keep each server from progressing too fast and people from breaking the content with exploits in a shared server, things that literally do not exist in modern live service games
Funny, I was about to reference older (pre-WoW) MMOs as a bit of a counterexample. I remember a prevailing notion of "well, if the game lets you do it then it's not exactly against the rules of the game, is it?" once upon a time, and a bunch of cases where the devs just took responsibility for exploits and never went further than inventory wipes for economy-breaking shit.
Not necessarily a bad thing for your whole community to not be afraid to bug-hunt, as long as you're paying attention to that community.
That's mostly in-game exploits though, which is different from packet fuckery or whatever so we should keep that straight if we're gonna discuss it.
Client-side cheats are dealt with harshly because they can come in a million forms, so it's mainly about deterrence. It creates a black market for people willing to burn accounts while developing tools, but presumably it cuts down massively on people who are willing to try developing shit, and mostly-legitimate users who might be tempted to try out a tool. You still get chinks who don't care and cases like TF2 sniper bots which look almost like massive organised corporate sabotage, but surely that'd be much worse otherwise.
It's a balancing act I guess. Especially if you have any kind of item economy in play, you need to look like you're doing
something or it has no credibility. The legitimacy of that approach to a game's business model is a separate question, but in some styles of games (like MMOs) it's kind of a mandatory feature of the genre and existed before anyone thought people paying money for virtual swords would be a thing.
When it comes to netcode then yes, your model needs to ideally be ironclad and zero-trust categorically. That's just normal network programming. Action games have historically had to bend this a bit because (a) shit could move too fast for latency/bandwidth/processing to keep up and (b) the conventions grew out of LAN play where it was expected you'd just walk over and punch someone who started flying around the map, but you need to have strategies to regulate online play. This is a big subject. But if you're not airtight at least up to the local instance level you get situations like Diablo 2 where players could use a session desync issue to inject
arbitrary fucking items into server inventories, and that shit could kill a game.
But a 4-player indie PvE thing? Who gives a fuck. Unless there's any persistent elements (like progression or inventories) that's a category where you can just not give a shit at all and go fully peer-to-peer with no anticheat whatsoever, that's what pretty much everyone else does.
Votekicks are usually plenty for that, depending on the game, but generally so if it's fully cooperative. If there's a chance of certain players being an actual nuisance by sticking around in the matchmaking pool or whatever I'd consider a "cheater island" system perhaps; give em some secret bayesian shitlord score and let them continue playing with other shitlords.
I think a lot more games could do something like that instead of banning, but keep in mind you're creating a subset of your audience will never admit they deserve it while any footage or whatever they generate will make your game look like absolute hell.
Probably doesn't matter to you, but it might be part of the reason more big games don't use this strategy.