While the most recent ban wave in GTA Online might have made the public lobbies somewhat safe for a few days, the hacker issue itself hasn't quite been corrected yet. Even after ban waves, some stragglers survive and the hacker population regenerates swiftly. The players are understandably bothered by the situation.
The hackers have become so prominent that sessions without them are unfortunately rare. These hackers can crash games, make jobs impossible by insta-killing everyone else in the lobby, or spawning infinite airplanes which plummet from the sky.
All in all, the hackers are just a nuisance — but like any pest, if there is too many of them, it becomes unbearable. Unfortunately early on in development, Rockstar had grossly underestimated the popularity of GTA Online. Never daring to hope that their game would have over 8 million unique players every week and bring in half a billion in profits from microtransactions, the team appeared to go with a design choice suited for something more back-stage.
GTA Online has a peer-to-peer server structure. Similar in theory to torrenting, instead of downloading data from a single centralized Rockstar server, your instance of the game downloads data from the instances of other players and vice versa. While this saves Rockstar the trouble and expense of building and maintaining the second largest server park in the gaming industry for a single game, it also limits their control.
Without centralized servers, effective anti-hacking measures are extremely difficult to implement, if at all possible. In its current state, GTA Online might never be hacker-proof unless Rockstar migrates to an internal server (which it would seem they can more than afford, seeing as GTA 5 made over $3 Billion in profits).









