How can I disable suggestions when adding a new phone contact?

My 2 latest phones have been some cheap Samsungs, they are great for what I do (i.e., phoning, texting, and OsmAnd) except for one thing: whenever I add a contact, when I type their name and their number, my screen gets flooded with suggestions from my existing contacts.

This is a major annoyance to me, and I think it should be for anyone who cares a bit about privacy, as this means whoever is looking at my screen (typically the person from which I’m taking the number) gets to see a bunch of names from my contacts. NOT COOL. Sure, I can hide the screen to this person, but how asocial and unfriendly is this? Plus I typically want that person to see what I’m typing, in order to live-correct any typo I might do.

To my great surprise, I found very, very few people talking about this online. Mainly, I just found this post from 4 years ago, “How to disable suggested contacts when adding a new phone contact“, and that’s it. I note that this person has a Samsung phone as well, and I don’t remember experiencing the issue on my previous non-Samsung phones… so it could be specific to Samsung’s version of the contact manager.

My “solution” was to install a different contact manager. Namely, Simple Contacts Pro, which is FLOSS and, as such, available on F-droid. I’m not thrilled, because I find it globally inferior to the default contact manager, but at least it got me rid of the damned suggestions.

So, while keeping that solution in mind, here are 2 open questions for you:
1) Can the Samsung contact app be configured not to show those damned suggestions?
2) Not related to this post, but how can I configure the contact app (Samsung’s, my replacement, or even some other one) to format phone numbers properly? By this I mean, when I type “+33123456789”, show the country-specific formatting, which here would be “+33 1 23 45 67 89”. I have this on my previous phone, but not on my current one, despite both of them running the same Android major version (through OTA updates). I assume there’s some setting hidden somewhere, which had simply a different default value between my 2 phones… I just can’t figure out where the hell it is.