I have a very hard time believing that the rate of cheaters go down in high elo. IIRC the new CS2 leaderboard still regularly features cheat companies on it (eg. config by [cheat dev] as the leaderboard name.) I myself do not have any data to back up that claim, but yours completely goes against what I have experienced.
I think the point about wallhack being more common in higher elo is more likely. I would add that some forms of trigger botting and recoil control cheats are actually more difficult to tell than wallhacking. Spinbotters don't get very high elo because they get mass reported because of how blatant they are, likely not due to VAC. I would need some real evidence to believe that claim (although as I said I similarly have no evidence myself to convince you to accept my claim).
One thing I can say is that I do frequently meet cheaters in CS these days, and the issue has gotten so bad in my experience that many cheaters even announce at the start of the game that they eg. have wallhack. Or one team member will turn on cheats if a game is getting close towards the end of the game. Also, the main reason FACEIT exists is for its anti-cheat, and on FACEIT there are almost no reports of cheating, and it's a big deal when it happens. If VAC was really working now we would see more people leaving FACEIT. I must ask when you started playing CS? Because the only way your post makes sense to me is if you started playing around the time when CS2 came out, which indeed did have more cheaters then it does now, but that was truly an exceptional level of cheating and I don't think that is a fair point of comparison, especially as a comparison to Vanguard.
I admit to taking claims about Vanguard at face value and I've never played Valorant (in part due to Vanguard, as I don't want to install a rootkit). But what you say about Vanguard also completely goes against what I have heard about it.
I absolutely support your claims about the leaderboards, it's an obvious show of cheating in CS2. There's also a strong incentive for cheating companies to be there so it might not be descriptive of the average experience. However, I can't speak for that level as my peak was barely over 25k (top 1%?) and the leaderboards are simply orders of magnitude away from that.
Regarding cheaters announcing they're cheating - I haven't encountered that in a long time, but I have heard of it often enough from new players... so it might be an issue with trust factor, but who knows?
I have actually been playing CS off and on since around 2017 - at least in my experience the current cheating situation isn't worse than it was back then, but it's also not better. The only time it was meaningfully better was when prime released around 2021.
However, it's also true that I started playing more after the release of CS2... and the aforementioned 10k Elo mark was a real pain point for me and my friends. Every time we were due to pass it we ran into cheaters, smurfs and even a server crash once (incredible luck?). After over 3 months we made it past 10k and climbed above 15k Elo within 2 weeks. - This is my experience and I have heard similar stories from other players. (Although ranks have been massively imbalanced at that time as well, which partly explains this?)
Nevertheless, it's good to have a discussion about cheating - in CS2's case the experience can be so different depending on the region, ELO, trust factor, ... with Valorant the discussion simply gets shutdown way to often because of "Vanguard" and without a replay system you're just left to your own devices.
I think the point about wallhack being more common in higher elo is more likely. I would add that some forms of trigger botting and recoil control cheats are actually more difficult to tell than wallhacking. Spinbotters don't get very high elo because they get mass reported because of how blatant they are, likely not due to VAC. I would need some real evidence to believe that claim (although as I said I similarly have no evidence myself to convince you to accept my claim).
One thing I can say is that I do frequently meet cheaters in CS these days, and the issue has gotten so bad in my experience that many cheaters even announce at the start of the game that they eg. have wallhack. Or one team member will turn on cheats if a game is getting close towards the end of the game. Also, the main reason FACEIT exists is for its anti-cheat, and on FACEIT there are almost no reports of cheating, and it's a big deal when it happens. If VAC was really working now we would see more people leaving FACEIT. I must ask when you started playing CS? Because the only way your post makes sense to me is if you started playing around the time when CS2 came out, which indeed did have more cheaters then it does now, but that was truly an exceptional level of cheating and I don't think that is a fair point of comparison, especially as a comparison to Vanguard.
I admit to taking claims about Vanguard at face value and I've never played Valorant (in part due to Vanguard, as I don't want to install a rootkit). But what you say about Vanguard also completely goes against what I have heard about it.