Indeed, a mess. MD services running even with third-party AVs installed has been a thing since Windows 11 for both free and paid. They remained running in an inactive state consuming barely any resources and only performed a signature update at least once every day. But I think at the start of 2024 or near the end of 2023 it changed to only having them enabled if the third-party AV don't have a firewall.
I only installed ESET Smart Security and Bitdefender TS on my system since the change, so I had MD processes turned off. What the Emsisoft support staff said matches my experience with paid AVs and your with free AVs so it seems that's how things are at the moment. MS should add changes like this to their MD update changelog or somewhere in their MD documentation.
