What's your preferred free antivirus solution on Windows?

To build on what you are saying, enterprise solutions are built up lock out the end user and provide reporting. Assuming your solution is receiving regular and timely updates, and it is able to respond appropriately, there is no issue.

I personally recommend Defender. It hits the minimum check marks. Almost all the other products out there are snake oil.

Defender can be bypassed with a simple Powershell script iirc, so it can be trivial for malware to stay undetected from Windows Defender. While it's good enough for most people, if you're concerned with security I would suggest either Malware Bytes or Bit defender instead. At least, I heard both of those are decent. If not them, just avoid Norton and McAfee like the plague since you would rather just deal with malware than them