Related posts showing up even when removed and 'don't display' turned off

I’m using the Manual Related Posts plugin as the functionality is exactly what was required; however the output needed to be a bit different from what is displayed as standard, so I turned off ‘Display related posts in post content‘ and wrote my own function to handle the output.

This all works fine, however I’ve noticed a handful of very specific bugs that all seem to work together:

• If I add a single related post, then later remove it, it disappears from the list, but its ID is still in the _yarpp post meta
• Even with ‘Display related posts in post content‘ turned off, the plugin still adds a related posts list to the end of post content (this is on a custom post type). Turned it on and off again, no joy.

In the end, I found the only way to stop this (seemingly random) force-adding of related posts to my custom post types was to add the following:

remove_filter('the_content', 'bawmrp_the_content', 9);

Note that the priority is the same as the original add_filter line in baw-manual-related-posts/inc/frontend-noajax.inc.php

https://wordpress.org/plugins/baw-manual-related-posts/