This is true of any online game ever. Games require integrity and there are plenty of people who would rather have game integrity than system integrity because, for them, the system is for the game.
I don’t think Riot is losing sleep over denying access to the 4 people who want to play Valorant on a Steam Deck.
And for macOS the OS itself provides enough system integrity that Riot don't need a kernel anticheat on macOS.
Steam Deck users need to ask Valve to similarly improve SteamOS's system integrity to prove to game companies that it's safe for people to run their games on it without compromising their game's integrity.
In Python in relation to ast, it does seem so yeah.
If you add two numbers in Python code, it looks like `1 + 1`, but if you use the module from `Lib/ast.py` linked above, how would it look like? I think it would be something like `Expression(body=BinOp(left=Name(id='x',ctx=Load()),op=Add(),right=Name(id='y', ctx=Load())))` which at a glance, certainly looks different than `1 + 1` in my eyes :)
In lisps, `(+ 1 1)` is just `(+ 1 1)` regardless if it's source code or AST, they're just the same thing.