>This is just bad advice, I'm sticking with the competition (which may not always be [product]).
This is my thinking as well. Microsoft's virus definitions are often worst in class and the agent itself only seems to update its definitions daily or, at most, twice day while 3rd party applications do so hourly or more. I've never seen MSE or Defender stop any ransomware attack. Not once. It just can't move fast enough to keep up.
Avast, Sophos, ESET, Panda, etc all trounce MS. Most of these are free for home and are largely trouble-free. Just because the author had a bad experience with Norton and McAfee doesn't mean the MS product is superior. I suspect the person who wrote this isn't a sysadmin who manages many users. The level at which MS can't keep up is embarrassing. I'm surprised to see this kind of thing at the top of HN.
My only compliment for MS is that SmartScreen is very aggressive in Win10 and will often flag suspicious executables correctly. I suspect the author is confusing SS with Defender. SS works because its heuristics based. Defender sucks because its signature based. The nice part is that these are two seperate applications, so if you run Avast or ESET, you still get SS.
Its also worth mentioning that a lot of Win10 "privacy" guides, often linked on HN, recommend disabling SS. I can't stress how much of a questionable practice that is. SS is a proper security layer and if sending MS a hash of an executable is such a problem for you, I suggest getting off Windows, as Windows does so much worse in regards to privacy even after following those guides.