By default this is ON and users don't have the competence to recognize that this is in fact increasing the surface area for attacks and to disable it. The mere existence of a setting that is ON by default doesn't absolve such AV companies.

But speaking of Bitdefender in particular, I installed it on my wife's computer, disabled that option, confirmed that it survived a restart, then one month later I discovered that it is ON again, probably due to an automatic update. It's also an "admin" setting and my wife's user account does not have admin privileges to turn it on or off.

So even with a setting in place, it's untrustworthy.