Exclude Users From Delve and SharePoint Online People Search

I recently opened a premier case to get updated information on these topics and this is the response I got: 

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Microsoft does not provide any out of the box options to remove users from Search results. The article that you referencing is a workaround provided by one of our escalation engineers in the past.

Please refer the below information:

Q] We would like confirmation that the below process (outlined in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Support-Blog/Exclude-Users-From-Delve-and-SharePoint-Online-People-Search/ba-p/170731) is supported by Microsoft.

• The process of excluding users from Delve and SharePoint Online People Search specified in the above article was a workaround suggested keeping the old classic search in mind.
• This is no longer working as modern search is not customizable. 
• Please note the approach taken in this article does not remove the People from search results but the query specified in the Search Result Web Part simply hides People while displaying in the search results.
• Please note: https://contoso.sharepoint.com/search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx People results page in SharePoint Online is deprecated, therefore the changes might have to done on results.aspx page.

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Q] How can we similarly exclude cloud accounts?

• Unfortunately, this is not possible. We are not aware of any workarounds for the same.

Even if somehow you would be able to hide the users from classic search, they would still appear in modern search / Microsoft Search.  I checked and confirmed this with our escalation team.

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The case has already been closed but I wish I would have asked about the statement "This is no longer working as modern search is not customizable. "  I mean, it never was customizable but apparently the default query did  exclude msExchHideFromAddressLists at some point in the past, so why did that change? Also, a curious finding from Matthew Lamb and one which I'll certainly test but be hesitant to leverage until we get clarification from Microsoft.