Classic old school antivirus? Not great, but did catch some things.
Modern EDR systems? They work extremely well when properly set up and configured across a fleet of devices as it's looking for behavior and patterns instead of just going off of known malware signatures.
They’re also not exactly risk free - [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_...
... because it's the only thing that somewhat works. From my personal experience, the heuristic and "AI-based" approaches lead to so many false positives, it's not even worth pursuing them.
The best AV remains and will always be common sense.