That’s an odd reaction, as they are a central design point of Discourse, for a variety of reasons:
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The “pot of gold” at the end of reading a topic is… more interesting things to read
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Suggested prioritizes topics you’ve participated in/created/watched, so it’s a fast way to clear your read queue without pogo-sticking back and forth to the topic lists.
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Suggested gives you a related walk in non-closed topics in the same category you’re currently in. I frequently find things in suggested that I wanted to follow up on eventually anyway.
So I’d suggest you might want to try absorbing the Discourse style a bit longer before jumping to extremes. Losing #2 in particular would be really painful for me as a user on your Discourse, if I’m actually reading stuff at all.
That said, if you want to remove, CSS is probably the way:
<div id="suggested-topics">
Just set that element to hidden in CSS, and you can probably set the # of suggested topics returned from the default of 5 to 1 in the site settings to reduce server load a tad.