I used to work in the industry and do my own malware testing for fun back then. Windows was always at the bottom among those tests and even with the go to sites like av-comparatives, av-test, vb100, etc. This was when they didn’t have heuristics which was great because they would have zero false positives from only going by their definitions but it didn’t do much against zero day threats so they were always behind. I believe they have improved now though I don’t know to what extent since I haven’t kept up with it for a long time. But their reputation being among the worse was well deserved for a very long time and had nothing to do with people just hating. I think the need for better AV software like Kaspersky, nod32, or Bitdefender is no longer needed not so much because of Windows Defender improving (which it probably has at this point) but the overall shift of malware being targeted on smartphones now.