Most antivirus I tested, even the paid ones, are so annoying with popups and complaining about cracks that I just take the risk and go without em
There’s a lot of malware that just chills in the background and hides itself well (e.g., auto-shuts down whenever task manager is opened), and does little to impact you aside from using some of your system’s resources.
Think being part of a botnet used for DDOS attacks, or a cryptominer that runs whenever you aren’t using much of your hardware’s capabilities.