No, this will not increase the amount of kernel panics you see. It just makes them more informational to the average person. Technical folks can disable it, non-technical folks won’t know how to enable it, so on by default it is.
Even the tabbed view was hard to use for me, especially the impossible to use “styles” box that scrolls a narrow view. I use it all the time on MS Word, and much prefer how they handle it.
Also, no CSD, so the title bar kinda just chills there, meanwhile it’s used in Microsoft Word.
Because if you’re gonna use an antivirus, Defender does just fine.
They all more or less use the same viral signature database and definitions, and are mostly feature-matched with each other. Why look beyond what your computer came with unless you’re installing something integrated with an RMM tool?