Removing the #more anchor from post URLs

My problem: I'm trying to remove the #more anchor tag from my 'Read more' links on standard post archive pages, but I can't make them disappear! The problem seems to be because I'm not using excerpts in this case. Instead I'm using the <!--more--> tag to display the 'Read more' button.

This is the code in my child theme functions.php.

function remove_more_link_scroll( $link ) {
	$link = preg_replace( '|#more-[0-9]+|', '', $link );
	return $link;
}
add_filter( 'the_content_more_link', 'remove_more_link_scroll' );

I got it from the Codex.

Example from a site still in development.

This is just a standard/default WP posts page.

Thanks for your help.

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PS: Reason I'm not using excerpts, if you're interested...

I have a few other posts listings on the site (e.g. 3 in a row on the home page), using Elementor's Posts widget. These automatically pull in the featured image, which I need to be at a certain ratio best suited to the display on the home page.

On the Blog listing page, I'm manually adding a fake 'featured image' at the top of posts, before the <!--more--> tag, at a better ratio suited to the Blog listing page - i.e. they're not as tall as the actual real featured images, so they don't use up as much vertical space on the listing page. If I use the same featured image that looks great on the home page, it looks too tall on the blog listing page.