How can I disable continuous play and play next for an iPad permanently?

Good day, all. This is an issue I've struggled on and off with, and any advice would be wonderful.

To provide some information, I am on the latest version of IOS 26 and have not yet updated because I know the first release of IOS 27 was rather buggy. I'm using Apple's Music app and am not subscribed to any music streaming or services; all of my files are my own and were uploaded to my music library manually by me from various sources. I purchased a new iPad Mini late last year, and it was and is meant to be a media-only device. I'd tried various Android music player programs, and the iPad is literally the only way to play music that I've found that does mostly what I want, can have most notifications shut off, and doesn't have weird problems with randomly failing to see files, etc. Like other users who have reported this issue, I notice that instead of playing specifically and only what I choose to hear, Apple Music randomly starts to choose items that it thinks I want to hear and plays them. Unless I've specifically shuffled a playlist, album, etc., I only want it to play what I have selected in the order I've specified, and as I've had this happen to me while playing classical music the last several times (i.e. a concerto or symphony that I wanted to hear in order), it was enormously annoying to have it played out of order or to hear one movement of one piece played right before a movement of another piece in a random part of that same playlist. I did create quite a few of those playlists so that I could randomly shuffle them, but some, such as some of the classical ones, really do need to be played in order. I frankly do not appreciate, no, I hate, an auto-setting that tries to help when I never asked for it and generally despise an app or machine that I am using to try to "think" for me; I will never be using the device or app with this feature if I can help it. To troubleshoot this, I opened up the Now Playing screen, made sure autoplay was not on, clicked on the Clear button in history, restarted the app, restarted the iPad, and resumed playing music from where I was before the app tried to assist me. I use Music on two devices, nearly always my iPad and very occasionally my Mac laptop, so I ensured that I'd disabled the options for them both. For a while, the app obeys as I'd like, and then, it will randomly turn the unwanted options on again; while the temporary fix works, with some fiddling, I am exasperated by the fact that it enables itself silently and that last night, I had to go in there and clear it once, then again, and then a third time, even after restarting the device, to try to get it to stop. I've never had it so persistently refuse to clear before. The last time I saw this problem was several months before last night, so I thought the problem was gone. It turns out I was very wrong, and I truly wish it could stop permanently. I know that it may work for only one play today or for six months from today before I have to go in and wrangle it again, and I feel that Apple should give us the option to have it permanently obey a user's wish not to use that queue while allowing those of us who like it to keep it on. If anyone knows of a way for this to be set up, please do let me know. I appreciate it very much