It is definitely a huge issue right now. However, until 90% of my games are plagued by getting killed by a hacker, I will still press on. I love this game and the community does, too. It is NO surprise to me at all that hackers have become an issue for a free to play game model that is less than 2 months old. CS:GO went free to play, and it is still one of the biggest shooters in the world, and the amount of hackers surely doubled since they can now do it for free; aside from paid cheats. Saying that hackers are destroying the game, is kinda just silly. Things like a version of CS:GO's Prime Matchmaking would easily sort out a large amount of hackers. Forcing them to spend money on phone cards to sign up to new accounts. ALSO, Respawn is hardware banning hackers. For all of those that still don't understand, that means not only is the hacker unable to boot Apex from the banned computer, but he/she also cannot connect on another machine from the same IP. A workaround for this has yet to be discovered, which means the number of hackers is steadily dropping. That's just facts.
That being said, obviously it HAS become enough of an issue to cause players to quit. Quite possibly the worst outcome, is that 80% of people playing games are actually just super average. Any time a good player lasers them with good tracking/aim, they will 90% of the time get suspicious and angry. Why? Because we talk about hackers every day, on every thread. They don't even know the difference between skill and hacking unless they spectate a blatant aimbotter. Thus, leading to a rage quit, when they've probably been killed by a hacker 1-2 times in 8 hours. Yet, to them, it's happening almost every game. Just TALKING about hackers has over-saturated the subject, thus creating a very toxic mentality of "I'm surrounded by hackers in this game.", from the whole community.
It is extremely early in Apex's lifetime for people to be making final decisions on whether to stick with the game or not, due to hackers alone. I understand the frustration (3000+ hours of Infestation Survivor Stories really numbs the pain of playing against hackers. it was 95% of the population for a good year, not to mention games like Dirty Bomb; rest in peace sweet prince) of hackers in your favorite games.
All this being said, I find it a little ridiculous how worried people are about the lifespan of Apex. Esports teams are already formed, contracts have been signed, and the competition is already under way. There is NO stopping Apex from being solidified in the eSports/gaming community as one of the highest populated shooters. Another big issue, is YouTube videos that are constantly clickbaiting players with things like "ShROuD SpEcTaTeS HACKERS in APEX LEGENDS - FUNNY MOMENTS #24." It becomes such a prevalent topic among the community. So prevalent, that people start jumping ship because their favorite big streamers are also running into the same issues. Yet, nobody stops to think about how that clip took 8 hours of streaming to actually get. 8 hours, one hacker=ThEy R rUiNInG ThE gaME!!!!
/endrant
TL;DR Sorry for the long rant, and I hope some of you will take the time to read it, and understand that the issue exists, but it is nowhere near as big of an issue as people think. Talking about it everywhere, average skill across the majority of players (you can downvote me for thinking this, but there is a reason why in every game with ranked MM, 80-90% of players exist in the bottom ranks), and general hatemachining of the hard work that Respawn is doing to prevent a takeover, is exactly what will make more players quit, than getting hacked once or twice a day.