i thought those color boxes were the badge wrapper bullets? i control those on other places on my site with by setting display: none;
we don’t use the sidebar yet, so not sure if it works on it, but i can suppress those color boxes in the legacy hamburger menu like this:
common css
.d-header .badge-wrapper.bullet .badge-category-parent-bg, .d-header .badge-wrapper.bullet .badge-category-bg {
display: none;
}