This thing is garbage. It has been garbage years ago when they first released it and it's still garbage TODAY. And I don't even go into protection vs ransomware. I'm talking how noisy and annoying this thing is because it's either entirely broken or Microsoft's whitelist is pure garbage.
When I run avast!'s Ransomware Shield, only app that even raised Ransomware Shield alert was for FileOptimizer. It's a relatively unknown app designed to trim down files to smallest possible size without decreasing quality. Fair enough. But everything else works seamlessly without any alerts. Paint.NET, MusicBee, CrystalDiskInfo etc. No issues while protecting exact same folders.
However, when I enable this thing in Windows Defender, I'm CONSTANTLY getting alerts for harmless things done by legit programs like above mentioned programs, to a point it's so annoying I always end up turning it off. I mean like COME ON Microsoft, how can you have this feature in your app for so many years and have it broken for so many years because clearly your whitelists are garbage. avast! doesn't have this issue because their whitelists are great. But one would expect that Microsoft would have same capabilities of creating good whitelists given they literally make the OS everything runs on and they certify things. I just wonder what the hell they are whitelisting if it's not commonly used apps that access user drives and documents...