For anyone else who finds the large number of recent items annoying when right-clicking the finder icon on Mac, simply:
System Prefs > Control Centre > Recent documents, applications and servers (right at the bottom) then switch to none 
For anyone else who finds the large number of recent items annoying when right-clicking the finder icon on Mac, simply:
System Prefs > Control Centre > Recent documents, applications and servers (right at the bottom) then switch to none