A kernel level rootkit is a usual form of an anti-cheat software nowadays (BattleEye, EAC).

You can dislike it, you can question whether you can trust such software from a Tencent-owned company, but it doesn’t make Riot’s solution somehow different.

1. Overwhelming majority of the (potential) player base is not "knowledgeable" as per your comment

2. It worked for LoL, which has made something like 10x the money of Dota 2. Valorant doesn't have to be "the best" in its category, as judged by connoiseurs, to win its market.

League was the first free derivative of the mod (Dota 2 was released nearly four years after it) and the complexity of the game was massively reduced to the extent that it's marketable in a way that Dota 2 just isn't. Valorant is trying to fight the incumbent while dealing with an inevitable balance trainwreck, and although Riot is going to throw a lot of money at it, it's not clear they realize how spoiled they were with the success of League. I'm sure the game will be around in a few years, but the odds of it largely supplanting CS don't look very good.

I've seen Valorant blow up in my little circle of online content/professional gamer types. Personally I haven't taken to it, I think the graphics are not very inspiring and the game play seems derivative of almost every team vs team shooter in the last decade. That being said, marketing means a lot and if they flood the digital airwaves, they might just reach critical mass.

Dota 2 was a (almost carbon) copy of a DotA map for Warcraft III (there was even a settlement between Blizzard and Valve about this). Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but it makes more sense to claim that LoL was inspired by a DotA map.

The '2' in the name should clue you in to its inspiration, which was not LoL.