How to address Microsoft Defender warnings in IntelliJ?

Question

I am using IntelliJ IDEA 2024.1.4 (Ultimate Edition) on Windows. Whenever I open a new project in IntelliJ, I get a popup warning like this:

The IDE has detected Microsoft Defender with Real-Time Protection enabled. 
It might severely degrade IDE performance. It is recommended to add the
following paths to the Defender folder exclusion list:
    C:\Users\ellen\.gradle 
    C:\Users\ellen\AppData\Local\JetBrains\IntelliJIdea2024.1    
    C:\Users\ellen\IdeaProjects\fundies1-hw2 
Choose "Automatically" to run a script that excludes these paths (note: 
Windows will ask for administrative privileges). Choose "Manually" to see
Defender configuration instructions.

If I choose "Manually", I am taken to Antivirus Impact on Build Speed. I followed the directions on that page to add the first two directories and the parent directory of all my projects, C:\Users\ellen\IdeaProjects, as shown by the below screenshot. The screenshot also shows that I continue to get the warning for a project in a subfolder of IdeaProjects.

The Microsoft documentation says that excluding a folder will also exclude its folders.

Why am I still getting warnings, and how can I get Microsoft Defender to exclude all of my project folders (assuming IntelliJ isn't reporting a false positive)?

Answer 1

After posting, I found out that this is a known IntelliJ bug.

The workaround is to exclude the directories, then to disable the IntelliJ warning.