Like most of you, I don't use antivirus software and haven't for years. Modern Macs (and PCs) are pretty secure by default.
However, with the rise of AI-assisted exploits/phishing and supply chain attacks, I've been reconsidering. We recently had an incident at work where CrowdStrike caught a RAT that a developer was inadvertently installing on their work computer.
1. Would consumer antivirus / EDR software even be good enough to block things like the Axios compromise?
2. What do you recommend?
Ironically this was sorted out in the 1970s and 80s, with Gnosis[1], and KeyKOS, but the PC revolution swamped it away in the noise as Windows and Linux took off. The best you can do without jumping to a capabilities based system in the meanwhile is to use hypervisors and the principle of least privilege to segregate tasks using VMs as very course grained capabilities systems[3].
This is the root cause that has been driving the adoption of hypervisors, virtualization, etc. for decades.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOSIS
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyKOS
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security