How to turn off the reviewing, editing, and view feature?

I agree that this new feature is stupid. When my users open documents from our document management system they are read only by default. Because Word now forces the document to be in Viewing mode they can't print using our print macros which adjust margins and insert letterhead. The option to switch to Editing mode is greyed out. A read only file should protect a document from being overwritten, not make it impossible to copy from or modify without saving elsewhere first! Dumb feature noone asked for!

Please answer the question, how do we turn this feature off?

This is causing my company issues as our legacy system calls word via macros to generate documents, and is now not allowing it to proceed. We require an urgent resolution to disable this feature.

The Office Insider blog post that Yuhao Li referred to (Easily switch between editing, reviewing, and viewing documents in Word **** ) said that the feature was released in the version 2206 update in late June or early July. To remove it, it's necessary to roll back to version 2205, which I have done here from Microsoft 365 version 2208. After the rollback completes, it may be necessary to restart Word twice to remove the button.

Follow the instructions at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2bd5c457-a917-d57e-35a1-f709e3dda841 . The config.xml file described in step 2 paragraph 3 should contain this text:

<Configuration>

<Updates Enabled="TRUE" TargetVersion="16.0.15225.20288" />

</Configuration>

I am submitting this issue to the Microsoft Word development team in hopes that the feature can be fixed to work with document management systems and automated merges.

It is unacceptable to ask customers to roll back a version to fix this problem. Doing so also removes Security updates. For a law firm, that would be suicide.