Hey, I ran into the same thing while working on a project for schoology lausd — we wanted to clean up the sidebar and get rid of all that “Shop By” stuff too. That blog you linked was actually super helpful! I also had to mess around with the `catalog.xml` file a bit to fully get rid of it across all pages.
Magento can be kinda picky with layout changes, but once you figure it out, it’s not too bad. Let me know if you got it working or still stuck anywhere!
