Because people rather trust those special country of origin because surveillance and enforcement by their own countries are harder than their own country. Like VPNs, it is harder to subpoena companies in those countries and some of those countries don't have mandatory data collection law. They recommend VPN like ExpressVPN(british virgin island) than PIA (US) because of their privacy law.

They talk about the country of origin because of the news they heard about NSA and Russia. If you care about regulation, then some countries in EU are good choice due to GDPR.

Anyway, digital crime are poorly enforce due to difficulty in finding or arresting the culprit (like WannaCry). Fixing the security flaws are cheaper than investigating the hacker. Some of the crime are not worth like hacked steam accounts.

People use antivirus like a seat belt or motorcycle helmet. You could drive safely and avoid accident but it exist in case of accident happen as accidents are not 100% avoidable. It does not mean you can drive carelessly. It depends what you use it for. For personal uses, people are fine with the simple Windows Defenders + ublock and avoiding any downloading or visiting shady websites. For some workplace, risk of getting targeted for malware is higher even if you use common sense to avoid it as it doesn't have to be you to spread it or get infected sharing the network.