"New Anti-Cheat"

Agreed.

Only speculating here, but it feels like this "Anti-Cheat" is intentionally easier to get through. As if EA wants everyone to quit playing Battlefield 1 and V and move to the newer one.

Again - this is just speculating, but this is EA. We know EA has a tendency to behave like the most evil bullies ever at school.

It was clear from cheaters for a short while, then it became worse than ever, I also experienced this. A few days of bliss, pure equal footing on all teams, and then HELL ITSELF THREW OUT IT'S WORST SOULS. These following reasons make sense:
1: The anti-cheat programmers are unskilled and/or dumb.

2: They are good programmers, but made a mistake, and it is being exploited.

3: As I already said - it is intentional. EA is sabotaging their own old games to force people to quit so they can shut down the servers more quietly and make it look like they had no choice.

4: All of the above?

5: Inside job - someone leaked enough info to make it extremely easy to bypass the anti-cheat.

There can be more reasons, but I won't list too many more. But again, this does feel intentional, since it is so much worse with cheaters than it was a few days ago. Like you say, Midnight, something is definitely going on here.