This is mostly where I am.

I was 4 when the first DOOM came out, 7 when Quake was released - I LOVE me some fps games.

But I don't find playing online fun anymore - The first 3 days are great, then you've ranked up a bit and start hitting the rampant cheating, and you realize it's just a waste of time sitting for 20 minutes in a game where some 12 year old (or much worse, some 30 year old) has just bought hacks to feel good.

To be honest - I actually blame the automated matchmaking systems more than anything else.

Give me the good ol' server lists back, where a real person is an admin, and you can make a group of friends. This monotonous, automated, matching bullshit sucks the soul out of most games. It's not fun anymore, it's designed to be a chore to prove that you're "better", with an intentionally game-ified rewards systems built to trigger gambling impulses.

I'm grave digging a bit with this reply... but I was around the same ages as you maybe a bit older at all those releases. The only satisfying time to play big name competitive PVP FPS is during Beta periods and the first few weeks after launch. However... I've found satisfaction for my FPS itch playing games like 'Squad' it's very niche I have my servers I subscribe to for a few dollars a month and sometimes on 'free weekends' we'll have 3-4 a night but admins ban them within a minute. Cheating is rarely a problem in niche harder to play / enjoy games but comes with a time commitment cost. I'd be embarrassed to say how many hours I have in that game but let's just say it's more than 500 hours in ~6 years.

Another good niche game with virtually non-existent cheating is Midair. It's mostly old-school FPS players reliving their Tribes days with good admins global banning the rare cheater.

Play with friends only, like in good-o-days.

I wish I could reply to this with a rallying cry for you to keep trying. But it's true, every 14 year old kid with a keyboard can cheat in competitive now.

How does Stadia play a role in this? I don't play video games outside of Football Manager so not knowledgeable in the area but I recall reading about the competitive scene of one of these games moving over to the service due to the cheating.

I think it would kill the scene, Stadia is anti-performance, it's a video feed streamed over the internet, with all the problems associated with processing on a remote computer, the primary motivator for high refresh rate monitors and low latency input is FPS games I would assume, so going from sub 10ms end to end latency to a 40ms latency on a perfect connection, I just don't see it being accepted.

As an aside it's recommended to keep latency under 20ms to stop motion sickness in VR.

If only there were a way to play the single player parts of shooters without the intrusive anti-cheat...

Singlehandedly killed my desire in multiple games.

Developers can support this, if they want. Conan Exiles guides you to install the 3rd party anti-cheat, but you can opt out and play single player fine or even multiplayer on servers that allow it.

As a former CSGO player who would've said this previously... Valorant is impressively legit

As someone who was really into CSGO, I can tell you the cheating just gets more subtle.

Up near LE/LEM ranks - no one is using the obvious hacks anymore. Instead it's things like a small autosnap radius for heads (ex: mouse within 3px of a players head? snap to head on fire), auto-recoil control, and map awareness hacks (4 went A, we go B)

It's a similar problem in Valorant - the goal of the cheater in the higher ranks is to get an unfair advantage with just enough of a cheat to leave the other players wondering if they actually cheated at all.

Hell - there are actually hardware cheats now - ex: mouse that will handle recoil for you in these games now.

It's destroyed my interest in the competitive FPS genre entirely.

What about all the DMA radars? My buddy in Malta is making a ton of money selling them. It's not aim bot but full map knowledge can be very powerful.