@PicklousBicklous Hello, You will be happy to know that the option to completely turn off search engine shortcuts is available starting from version 131.0.5877.111.
Here is how you can do it:

Update your browser to version 131.0.5877.111 or newer. Navigate to opera://settings/early_bird in your address bar and enable Early Bird. Once Early Bird is enabled, the search engine shortcuts feature will be disabled automatically.
If you ever want to turn the shortcuts back on in the future, you can easily do so by going to opera://settings/search.