That's hilarious, I didn't realize you couldn't turn it off. I just tried disabling all the recommendation options and it still shows the category, except now instead of recommended items, it says "to show your recent files and apps, turn them on in Settings."

This sort of thing used to bother me back when I took Windows seriously.

It can be ripped out using regedit, I'm sure.

It's been a while since I used Windows as a daily driver, but I did oscillate between W10 and Arch for about half a year, and the Arch mentality creeped into Windows. I ended up adding a context menu to Explorer so I could paste images on my clipboard directly to a the folder I had open. I had to create keys in the Explorer portions of the registry.

If I could do that, I'm sure you can root around in the Start Menu parts of the registry and rip it out.