Remove History Items setting still won't work

For many years, the preference or setting in Safari's General tab to "Remove history items:" with a user selected timefram . . .has never worked as advertised. My settings are set to remove history items after a day, but I currently have about 6 days worth of history stack up now. Deleting manually seems the only way to achieve that. I know there are other ways to dump the history, but this seems like it should be a functional preference or otherwise be removed from the settings panel. It's an embarrassment. Very typical of Apple's comfort with sloppy coding, as long as it looks pretty.

The behavior persists across processor types and hardware generations and types. It's as if it was coded to actually NOT ever work, forcing users instead to manually dump history and all the icon/cookie cruft it accumulates.