My best guess is that it originally was "fucking," someone censored it to something like "hecking," then someone else censored the censor back to "fucking"
Read the EULA, if you don't want an anticheat that requires those permissions then don't install the game.
Something having kernel access doesn't make it a rootkit, it makes it high-risk for misuse by a threat actor. Only if the software was exploited by a bad actor to acquire root/hardware permissions would this issue actually become something.
That, or if the anticheat wasn't uninstallable and/or dodged scans intended to locate it, etc.
Putting the responsibility to understand legalese (and advanced concepts like rootkits) to such an extent on the end user is just straight gaslighting. Nobody has the required expertise to determine what an EULA actually says outside of the lawyer who wrote it, and even then, I wouldn't guarantee it.
in 1999 you had the ability to get into a music shop, load the cd and test listen to it. Or just go through the music charts. Or wish for a specific song on radio.
Also 1999 already had Napster, Morpheus and others.
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren't the person to make the (first!) copy, and they're not even sure what's on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
