I’m a DevOps engineer by trade, and do a lot of work with network security. “Never trust anything on the other side of a connection” is fine and all as a rule of thumb, but real solutions have more nuance than that. What is “trust”? Should I just never connect to anything? Obviously we have to, so we’re already assuming some level of “trust”. There are always degrees of trust, and a peer to peer game server is a higher degree than browsing a site hosted by a server, is what I think the developer meant.
Now, I agree with you, this shouldn’t be some full substitute for proper network security or whatever, but I don’t think they’ve given any indication that’s the case. I can also speak from experience that certain choices in tooling are thrust upon dev teams at times, for cost or “political” reasons. It’s also fully possible it’s just a bad call from a techie who worked on a prior project with it or something.
I’m not arguing that anything is good or bad. I’m all for people modding their single player games. I’ve played Frankenstein Skyrim myself many times. I’m a big fan. All that said, this game has a multiplayer element through Galactic Warfare and matchmaking co-op. I think anticheat is entirely reasonable in those scenarios. You can say the multiplayer-lite GW feature isn’t worth the limitation (I would probably share that view), but AC is not evil in all situations. It’s just kind of entwined with certain online multiplayer features, to avoid the equivalent of “Boaty McBoatFace” happening when trolls hit critical mass in your game.