I've been forced to use a number of products over the years at work from Trend Micro to McAfee. They all need curated exclusion lists and we have to ask developers to put all source controlled files under an excluded path common for all devs.
McAfee is by far the worst offender IMO when it comes to file IO. We eventually dropped it in part to it's insistence on locking files in App Data which is a common scratch space for almost every Windows App.
to be fair, most malware hides in App Data too... it's a convenient place thats hard to find using windows explorer and guaranteed to be user-writable.
Yes and McAfee was locking files for tens of seconds while it scanned. Things like Visual Studio and Notepad++ would become unresponsive after a single keystroke.
Back when I had to use McAfee on a work PC; I was using WSL 1 for building the projects I was running. Symptom was basically: do a compile, lose most of your RAM until next reboot. Stopping WSL wouldn't reclaim it; nothing showed up in Task Manager, Process Explorer, etc. The RAM was just gone; unusable. Post a bug to WSL, was immediately asked if I had McAfee and if so to disable/uninstall. Problem solved. But, due to insurance reasons, I had to have an AV running, and powers that be decided Defender was sufficient. Never McAfee again. It's been a pile of crap for decades; no signs of it getting better, either.
McAfee is by far the worst offender IMO when it comes to file IO. We eventually dropped it in part to it's insistence on locking files in App Data which is a common scratch space for almost every Windows App.