Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly 20 years ago I was both a competitive CS player and I also liked reverse engineering so I was somewhat interested in the cheating community and even programmed a custom injector and cheat for CS (it was surprisingly easy if you knew a bit about Windows APIs). Cheats were a problem. Not even a nascent problem, but already established. Bad enough that VAC was released in 2002, Punkbuster in 2000... In competiti…
Competitive gaming cannot possibly be huge. Like literally it is impossible for 99% of gamers to be competitive in any meaningful sense (if you play a game with 1M players and are in the top 1%, congrats, there are 10,000 people who are better than you. You are still unremarkable). It never was huge; it was just a niche you were in. There's massively more people that are just playing the game too blow off steam.
Who said anything about meaning? People being shit at the game invalidates that the game ruleset is competitive?