It seems Total Protection is now McAfee Essential, one step above Basic. In all their new products, they describe the firewall as: "Secure your firewall and block hackers from accessing your home network". That's not really accurate, is it? It's not McAfee firewall blocking hackers from their incoming attacks, it's now Windows Defender. McAfee should block outgoing connections, and it might. I have yet to encounter a single connection blocked by "Advanced Firewall" although the screenshots show it should block everything from Google Adservices onwards.
Nevertheless, it seems that McAfee uses some internal database to identify sites that are not "reputable" and blocks them, and they justify it by saying: "In new LiveSafe and Total Protection, we wanted to make it easier to configure the firewall by only providing the options that the average customer needs". I seem to recall that this was the default on the old firewall, too. You had McAfee's firewall deciding which connections to allow and which to block, you had "Smart Access" turned on by default, and so on. You had to play with the settings a lot to make it "stealth" and turn on all the "ask me to decide" options. If you need to block only what McAfee deems risky, you might as well use Defender on default settings and rely on Microsoft's estimation on which sites and apps are "reputable". I doubt there's that much of a difference there.
The whole point of an additional firewall you pay for is to get control. Control over which programs can access the Internet, how, and when. Just as an example, I use an accounting software that's five-years-old. It has no online banking capabilities, so it doesn't need Internet access, ever, but it checks for updates and applies them by default unless blocked by the firewall. I don't like the new versions so I want to keep using this old one, and the old firewall allowed me to do just that by letting me block the update check. The new one does not, because McAfee apparently has decided the app and the connection are "reputable". And all this happens behind the scenes, without me knowing about it. What's the deal here? Does McAfee expect me to pay for a firewall and then configure the free Windows Defender to block the app? Doesn't make any sense.
Also, let's not forget that the Total Protection has turned into a beta-version in other aspects, as well. Not related to firewall, almost every setting in "General Settings And Alerts" has been removed. "Information Alerts" tab exists, and there's even an "apply" button available, but you can't use the "apply" button because there's no longer a single setting available under that tab.
My opinion is that this is a product that most definitely wasn't ready for public release. I'd imagine most of what McAfee calls "average customers" are happy with Defender or some other freeware, and only the ones wanting more will pay for extra software. Even so, if McAfee wanted to make everything as simple and non-configurable as possible, they should've at least offered a separate "basic" and "advanced" modes. They wouldn't have had to do much extra to make that happen. They already had all the features we're asking for here, but they removed them. A bad move. As a general rule, when you buy a product or a program, you expect it to do everything it does at the time of purchase. Usually it ends up doing a lot more, thanks to updates, but it's extremely rare that an important feature would be removed after purchase. How many would pay to buy a phone that, after a few months, only lets you call some specific numbers that the phone manufacturer has deemed "reputable", or doesn't let you block calls that come from numbers that have, again, deemed "reputable"? I doubt that manufacturer's next model wouldn't be a bestseller...
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