Nowhere does the article say that. Please don't spread made-up bullshit like this.

Maybe you could consider that I didn't just make that up. I have a Chinese person with me, albeit non tech person, that read it for me. I could have added that "apprently it says this", but your phrasing is uncalled for.

I happen to know the language so don’t need a Chinese person with me. And I can tell you it doesn’t say that, or anything close to that, apparently or not; it’s not a long post so it’s not like I would miss anything. If you disagree, point to the specific sentence and we can have a discussion.

I guess it might be a misunderstanding based on 幸好之前用火绒的自定义拦截功能，设置了一些重要或敏感数据目录的保护。 "Luckily I had previously used Huorong's user-defined interception functionality to set up protection for a few important or sensitive data folders." (Which is how they noticed that QQ was trying to access them.)

So yes, if your antivirus allows you to deny QQ access to your browser history, it won't read your browser history. But most QQ users probably didn't do that, considering that it went undetected for so long.

'disabling a rule' is a lot different than 'create a manually defined protected folder from within a third party application elsewhere'.

these two statements are in no way equivalent.

Of course not, but if you retell it twice, one might turn into the other.