rui no onna
Contributor
Hotspot is always on. Cannot be turned off. Whe you turn it off, what you are actually doing is turning it off to others. If you have a device signed onto the same Apple account, you can connect to the phone using hotspot even if it is turned off. I tried turning it off doing various things, but no go. I can still connect to the SE 2022 using my iPhone 8 or my iPad.
Have you tried disabling bluetooth? As far as I know, iCloud account Personal Hotspot performs the initial handshake via bluetooth and then uses wifi for actual hotspot.