WTF, Opera?
I came here hoping to find a way of disabling this "feature" and I see I'm not alone. Currently running v16.0.3.
Opera Mini has been my primary mobile browser for years and I will be sad to see it go, but spamming our speed-dial pages with unwanted garbage and offering no way of fine-tuning or removing it if we so choose, is simply unacceptable.
It looks like the Android app may have a setting for disabling this, so why not iOS and who at Opera could have possibly thought that was a good idea?