Turning off the assistant entirely isn’t a step I’d expect a lot of people to take (because they use the assistants). I think it’ll stick around if you can tolerate it, because it’s likely provided for certain parties that will be very irritated if that ability is removed.

I not only can tolerate it, but it’s what I prefer. I wish they’d put “hold power button” back to show the restart dialog, I never used the assistant at all, and I even turned off that “google feed screen” that sits to the left of normal android screens. I love to disable junk.