If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
FWIW I'm running CachyOS and for the first time in my life have moved 95% away from Windows (still maintain a partition that I use every few weeks for a game that can't run on Proton). KDE 6.6 is a delight to use and everything "just works" for me, I don't have to worry about ungodly telemetry, and software fixes come in quickly.