It's irresponsible to make such a broad claim and back it up with really vague anecdotal evidence. Yes, there are a lot of lousy AV products that are at best a break-even for security, but there are some that don't suck and generally you have to pay for them - what a strange concept.
I'm not going to advocate for any particular vendor as I used to work for an AV company (and currently use a product from a competitor). But I can attest that I've used products that have caught threats that Windows Defender didn't, and many products also include a much more robust and configurable firewall.
It's annoying when someone else's lousy code breaks your own code. This happens to the sites I administer frequently, where we will randomly get blacklisted by some no-name AV product's web security feature. I understand the frustration when you have no control over this. But to conclude that all AV software is bad does not follow from the evidence given.
I completely agree with you, I find this "disable antivirus" to be such a bad advice!
Yes, it may work for tech savvy or security aware person. If you know what you're doing you're much less likely to get into problems.
It won't work for general public though.
And the argument being made that "for example, see bugs in AV products listed in Google's Project Zero. These bugs indicate that not only do these products open many attack vectors" could be made for any piece of software your install.
Actually I don't think they could. A-V products inevitably insist on running with very high privileges on target machines, restricting the OS' ability to mitigate any vulnerabilities.
A-V products also have been shown be research from Google Project Zero to be doing very dangerous things (like running a local web server you can send commands to that are executed on the device).
When you combine high-privileged code with dangerous practices you get a very nasty set of risks that aren't present with most other software.
As there is an alternative that doesn't have similar problems (MS Defender) it seems sensible to recommend it.
I'm not going to advocate for any particular vendor as I used to work for an AV company (and currently use a product from a competitor). But I can attest that I've used products that have caught threats that Windows Defender didn't, and many products also include a much more robust and configurable firewall.
It's annoying when someone else's lousy code breaks your own code. This happens to the sites I administer frequently, where we will randomly get blacklisted by some no-name AV product's web security feature. I understand the frustration when you have no control over this. But to conclude that all AV software is bad does not follow from the evidence given.