ah yes, windows defender

Meanwhile MS EXCEL: This file with random macros from a shady website could gain admin rights, install 3500 viruses, lock you out, join a botnet, put a million dollar ransom on your PC all within the first minute after opening without you even noticing. Please click ok if you are fine with that.

Are you crazy? An exe could corrupt the registry, delete system32, format C:, or delete the MBR! They're dangerous!

That’s because your average Windows user is only going to download a .exe. Only power-users (and idiots/daredevils) are going to do anything remotely close to the other things, and they would be well aware of what they are doing.
Do you actually think your average windows user knows what any of the other things mean? Nope.

Windows only pretends to let you be the administrator, until Microsoft wants to do something shitty to you.
Linux actually makes you the administrator, so any screw ups are on you.

Whoever made this is evil. I tried to blow that stupid dot of paint in the middle off my screen

All of those things require admin rights, which is an explicit acceptance that you are now working with things that could fuck your shit up. Modern Windows, unless you disable UAC, asks you to confirm you're sure you want to use admin rights before you have the opportunity to break any of the shit you claim it's chill about.
Running an exe doesn't require admin rights, hence the extra warnings. Plus a malicious exe could do all that shit without asking for admin first through a privilege escalation exploit.
I swear, people find more uninformed shit to complain about with Windows every day.

Defender was never designed to help directly against any of these except the last one.

Windows defender works, and it works really well. I haven't had a virus or used an anti virus (most of which feel like viruses themselves with how intrusive and annoying they have become) in like two decades.

And people say Linux lets the user shoot himself.
- Tbf, you could use portable / user installs (if everyone would actually do their apps right), you can (now) use a package manager and you can (sometimes...) get an official, verified version of an app through the store and even if not, installers are (usually.....) signed these days (although criminals do apparently get signatures too........)... And then this all falls apart, because you need a random driver from a random website. Security 👉👉

I'm pretty sure you get warnings trying to delete system32.
Edit: And I mean beyond the standard UAC pop-up.

I poked around in the registry a bit too much awhile ago and managed to delete my only user. Oops! Completely bricked my install, couldn't even unfuck it with safe mode shenanigans. Had enough space to clone my entire drive so I just lost a couple days of time fiddling with it, only a couple hours actually copying my shit back and forth.