It would be required if the user activated Win firewall outbound rule processing.
When an app is added to Win Firewall as shown in the posted screen shot, I believe both inbound and outbound allow firewall rules are created for the app.
On the other hand if equi.exe outbound processing was being blocked via Win firewall outbound processing, Eset would not be able to download anything including sig, updates. One explanation is user previously created an equi.exe outbound firewall rule only allowing ports 80,443 and forgot they had done so. Many using the Win firewall, deploy a third party front-end tool to the Win firewall; e.g. Windows Firewall Control, which does create port specific outbound rules.