That stopped being a solution when winning online started mattering. There are real money prizes for online game tournaments. Weekly events can have hundreds of dollars in their prize pools. Big events can have thousands.

Suddenly vote kicking had to go, because it was abused. Not in the tournaments themselves, but in open ranked play which serves as qualifiers. An active game can rack up thousands of hours of gameplay per day, far beyond the ability of competent admins to validate. Especially because cheating is often subtle. An expert can spend more than real time looking for subtle patterns that automated tools haven't been built to detect.

Games aren't between you and your 25 buddies for bragging rights anymore. They're between you and 50k other active players for cash prizes. The world has changed. Anti-cheat technology followed that change.

You can't have vote kicks/server admins/hosted servers with competitive ranked ladders. If your solution is "don't have competitive ranked ladders" then you are just telling the majority of people who even care about anti-cheat to just not play their preferred game mode.

Why can’t you have that with competitive ladders? Presumably theres still mechanisms to kick people in game if they start for example spewing racist messages in the game. What difference is it to kick someone one way or another? Not to mention plenty of games with vote kick mechanisms did have strong competitive scenes.

If you only allow users to kick their teammates for suspected cheating, they will have little incentive to do so.

If you allow users to kick opponents for cheating, they will have an incentive to kick legitimate players who are playing well.

You cannot have a global competitive ladder if the ladder is split into a ton of different admin-run servers. overwatch had a version of this problem where people would queue into the Australia region during low traffic times to boost their rank.