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@Chesca11  That last question you asked is loaded, and you will invariably find different opinions.  Some people have AV that they love, maybe because it caught a virus that something else missed one time.  But it is the case that Defender holds up well in virus detection against the competition, including paid competition.  Some third-party AV offers extra features to try differentiate themselves from the pack, but what one person calls "features" other people (such as myself) would call "bloat".

But what is inarguable is that in order to do their job, AV needs to hook deeply and pervasively into Windows, often using techniques that Microsoft does not officially support, and that can sometimes cause problems.  That's how third-party AV can render systems unbootable after Windows updates sometimes.  Essentially, Microsoft changed something that no third party applications should have been touching anyway, but the AV tool was, and that plus the fact that AV runs at low level means that when the AV could no longer hook into Windows that way, the system couldn't operate properly (or at all).  Users of course blame Microsoft since, "My system worked before I installed the Windows update!" even though the true underlying cause was their AV.

And then I've just seen a bunch of other cases that make me think that anti-virus has gone too far, in the sense that in their quest to prevent viruses, they've started meddling so much that they can interfere or bog down even legitimate activities, ironically causing them to generate the very virus-like behavior of poor performance and blocked activity that they're supposed to be protecting against.  For example:

• A while ago, Microsoft changed the digital signature format of Windows updates (from SHA-1 to SHA256).  When that happened, systems that had Symantec AV installed could no longer install Windows updates.  For some reason, Symantec AV was meddling with the Windows update process, even though Microsoft already has safeguards for ensuring that only legitimate updates get installed, but Symantec didn't like the new signing algorithm and that brought down Windows Update on those systems.
• In another Symantec case, Google tried to enable a new security feature in Chrome.  Systems with Symantec AV installed started experiencing frequent Chrome crashes.  It was so bad that Google rolled back that change for a few months to give Symantec time to fix their AV.  A few months later, Google enabled that Chrome feature again....and once again people with Symantec AV started seeing Chrome crashes.
• In a third Symantec case, Symantec AV actually CREATED a security vulnerability.  It turns out that when your application hooks practically everywhere into your system, then a flaw in your code can be exploited from practically anywhere on your system.  In this case, the bug was in Symantec's network traffic scanner, and it meant that an attacker could compromise your PC simply by sending it specially crafted network traffic, with no action required on your end.

The really annoying thing for me is that AV often doesn't tell you every time it's interfering with something, and in some cases even disabling them doesn't COMPLETELY disable them, which means that if you're having weird issues, even figuring out whether your AV is the culprit can be difficult.

And some AV solutions expect you to PAY for the privilege of this nonsense!

These types of issues are why I dumped third-party AV when Microsoft released Security Essentials, which has since been rolled into Defender and built into Windows.  And nowadays with Windows updates and even major releases coming all the time, the risk of bad interactions between AV and Windows is higher than it was even back then.  So I just have never felt it was worth the hassle (and especially the money).