I've been using computers for 40 years, have never installed and have always disabled malware scanners, and never had a virus. Maybe I'm special. But I'm not that special. There are 3 billion Android uses in the world, almost all of them don't have malware scanners, and almost all of them have never been infected by a malware. Ditto iPhone users.
To be fair, I haven't used Windows for the latter 1/2 of that 40 years. So maybe it's only Windows users who need to go around x-raying all data storages.
All Google Play Protect does is compare the installed apps on your device to a list of known bad ones, and uninstalls any Google doesn't like. For the most part all it's doing is looking for apps you've installed that Google later deemed bad and removed from the app store. That's a slight exaggeration, but not a big one. The performance impact is what you would expect from that description - almost none.
A windows virus scanner tries to get itself involved in most mouse clicks. Open an email - it's reading it over your shoulder. View a web page - it's looking at it too. Copy a file from USB - it's inspecting every byte. Every time you write a file, it's sniffing over the new contents. The performance impact is what you would expect from that description, ranging from noticeable to crippling in the worst cases. When it does find a virus it can't "just uninstall it". It may well have replaced parts of Windows itself.
Google Play protect is all you need when you design an OS with security in mind. The situation on Windows is where you end up when focus on delivered features, security be damned.
It’s not a very high bar: I have not seen it find anything in a long time, neither on my machines, nor on the ones I inspected after they had been owned.