Recently there was a thing where VAC would erroneously flag AMD’s antilag+ feature as cheating, and issue a ban.
AMD then quickly disabled the feature by default but now Valve also patched detection for it and is now, at least according to these patch notes, reversing the bans.
By that logic buying a better pc is cheating because it gives you an advantage. We need some nuance here. All modifications to game files are not cheating, (even if not allowed in any case), because well, not all modifications are cheats. This is a great example actually, because AMD sanctioned, graphics card driver latency reduction isn’t a cheat. Obviously the way it was implemented was clearly very problematic and should’ve never been greenlit.
However, this isn’t an unintentional cheat and detecting it as such is incorrect. It is, however, a modification and those are reasonably disallowed, it is totally fair to disallow that.