Well, there's no silver bullet, but I wouldn't necessarily call anti-virus suites irrelevant. The problem with Norton, Kaspersky, McAfee, etc., is that they're always scrambling to keep up with new attacks and sometimes give false positives. They're resource hogs and you take a performance hit when you leave them running for real-time protection. Sometimes they become attack vectors (targets) in themselves. Also, Norton puts its hooks deep into your OS, making it sometimes impossible to remove completely. I've heard of some people having to wipe their hard drive completely to get rid of Norton.
I'm running Windows and have simply used Windows Defender for real-time protection for years now. Don't open e-mails from sources you don't know, and stay away from dark corners of the web. It sounds simple, but those actions alone go a long way to protection. Once a week I'll do a complete system scan with Defender, then I'll use a couple of spyware scanners like Malwarebytes and Super Anti-Spyware for a complete scan and shut them off for another week. It's still possible to get hit, but I'd rather do this than run those anti-virus pigs all the time.
These Spectre/Meltdown types of attacks are being hyped as though they're impervious to anti-virus checks, but no one says it specifically that I can find. And notice this part of that Register article: "This security shortcoming can be potentially exploited by malicious JavaScript within a web browser tab, or malware running on a system, or rogue logged-in users, to extract passwords, keys, and other data from memory. An attacker therefore requires some kind of foothold in your machine in order to pull this off."
This description is no different than any other malware in existence, so I'm not seeing these new attacks as extraordinarily dangerous.
