Footnote (empty Metadata)

Hi WordPress team,

I’m using WordPress primarily as a social media management tool, and I recently discovered, while developing a custom metadata inspector, that a footnotes meta field is automatically being created whenever a new post or page is made. Occasionally, this field also appears across all posts within a category, which becomes difficult to manage.

I understand this footnotes feature was introduced in WordPress 6.3 as part of the new block editor functionality. While I appreciate the intent behind it, I have no plans to use it in my workflow. My use case prioritises clean metadata for debugging and automation purposes, and having unused or unnecessary meta entries like footnotes makes this more difficult.

At the moment, I’m resorting to manually removing it in functions.php using:

add_action('save_post', function($post_id) {
if ( ! in_array(get_post_type($post_id), ['post', 'page']) ) {
return;
}
if (get_post_meta($post_id, 'footnotes')) {
delete_post_meta($post_id, 'footnotes');
}
}, 20);

This workaround is not ideal and feels like an unnecessary step. It would be incredibly helpful if WordPress provided an option to disable the footnotes block entirely (either via a setting or a filter), or at least prevent it from creating this meta field unless it’s explicitly used.

Thanks for your time, and I hope you’ll consider adding a way to disable this in a future release.

Kind regards