People & Places Album is enforced

You can remove all but one people and pets from the People&Pets album, so you will not be seeing a "bunch of unwanted faces" - keep just the most pleasing or least annoying one. if you remove all people from the people & Pets album, Photos will just start over with the face recognition and waste a lot of processing power.

1. Open the Photos app  on your iPhone.
2. Tap Albums, tap People & Pets, then tap Select.
3. Tap the person or pet that you want to remove, then tap Remove.

to ensure that the remaining named pet or person will not appear in Memories or featured photos, tell Photos to feature the person less: Identify people and pets in photos on iPhone – Apple Support (UK)

1. Open the Photos app  on your iPhone.
2. Tap Albums, tap People & Pets, then tap the person or pet you want to see less often.
3. Tap , then tap Feature [name] Less.
4. Choose to feature the person or pet less or never, then tap Confirm.

See also: Manage memories and featured photos in Photos on iPhone

When you keep the Albums tab set to "My Albums" before you switch to a different tab, you will not be shown the People & pets.

I am not very optimistic, that Apple will ever make it possible to hide the People&Pets album or make it possible to disable the scanning for faces. It is part of the scene analysis and at the heart of the artificial intelligence built into photos. Many of the processes need to know, which of our photos are showing people or pets, for example the search for photos of a certain category or the automatic creation of memories or, the sharing suggestions, the featured photos. If you do not want Photos to be able to use the results of the face detection and face recognition, do not name the detected faces and do not assign them to your contacts. Assign all detected faces to the same name to merge them and call this merged person "average citizen".

You may want to wait for iOS 18. Apple seems to have listened.

Apples presentation at the WWDC 2024 has shown, that we will have much more control about the album that will be showing in Photos. We will be able o rearrange the items and hide the ones that are not relevant for us, so they will not waste space on the tiny display of our iPhone.

This is primarily a user-to-user support forum; other Apple users like you. You may want to also post to Apple via Feedback - Photos - Apple

I'm with you. Feature less or never again does not work. I've tried repeatedly and the same photos come up every time. It IS facial recognition and incredible intrusive.

So, my best option, which I chose, was to put my photos on a thumb drive and carry it with me so my photos remain mine and are shared with only friends and family. I will no longer store my pic and vids in my devices. I also dumped the cloud.