Can now confirm this is fixed with the Android 15 update. Not sure if by Smarty or Google as I think Google were going to allow users to manually override carrier choice on this from Android 15 but also there is a new carrier update version dated Jul...
Your observation was entirely correct to make and the other commentators seem to have entirely missed the point/not understood the technical details. 2G networks due to the specification are highly vulnerable to attacks and the fact that Smarty (and ...