avast has (fortunately) a lot of servers to update the 100+ million users
this may well be the case, but I've run Avast free, and I can tell you that the tens and tens of connections detected by CIS (when I was still running it together with Avast free),
have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the updates.
They're connections established by Avast UI to get the ad for AIS. Blocking it (Avast UI) through a firewall doesn't prevent auto-update from working normally (the server lookup is invoked by "Avastsetup"), it just blocks the ad and the tens of useless connections. No problem with this ad, it's not "graphically" intrusive. Hey, we've been through this before
...but no way to accept that a system should connect to tens of servers continuously just because of that.
This said, Avast UI also connect in AIS, but just once in a while, for the network utilities bundled with the firewall (trace route and who is). So it's not a problem there.
edit: I still got the screenshot, that was happening constantly