I think all security programs are intrusive, all free versions monetized, and companies part of economies with intrusive policies (including "eyes" nations). Meanwhile, more features may lead to slowdown, common sense, etc., won't help as much given malware that are activated without user interaction, and costs can be high (cheap with promo prices, and then they go up, with high costs if you need to pay for several devices).
Given these, you are better off looking at your budget, and then using the AV that fits that but has the most protection but tolerable effects on computer performance.
For free versions, you will likely choose from Avast, AVG, and Kaspersky. If you're willing to accept some lack of features, you may include Avira and Bitdefender, or just stick to the one built-in in Windows. You can also tweak the latter, but keep in mind that there's a reason why those tweaks are disabled by default. Similar applies to security programs where you'll be asked to allow or deny various apps: if you make a mistake, you can cause the system to malfunction, and you'll have to figure out what to undo to solve that.
From there, YMMV, especially when you test them using benchmarking programs like Novabench and try all sorts of tasks. In my case, Kaspersky appears to be the best, but I suspect that random BSODs are caused by its use of virtualization (which I had to disable in the hardware) and my system being old (the BIOS is from 2016), so I went back to Avast.
I remember using AVG, and it was OK, but when I tried to uninstall it to test another AV, part of it stayed in the system and I could only remove it by doing a repair install of the OS.
