iTunes automatically sets song ratings for no apparent reason

I've recently gone back and uploaded a lot of old CDs and gone about rating all my favorite songs to create smart playslists, and these playlists are being blown up by iTunes seemingly randomly assigning ratings to some of my songs.

For example, I have a greatest hits album with a few songs which I manually assigned star ratings. These ratings show up as blue stars. For some albums, all of the songs within are given black stars, which I didn't assign. I can give them different blue stars (1-5), but for songs which I want to have zero stars, it automatically goes back to the auto-assigned black stars.

Settings... I'm on iMac Sequoia 15.4.1 currently, and don't see any helpful information or settings that can stop this. On my iPhone iTunes settings, again nothing that seems to affect it. I've un-favorited (different option than ratings) all songs and albums, and that didn't do it. The albums/songs that were black-starred I've cycled as favorites and off again, even 'disliked' the song... no change there. It seems Apple just wants me to have some songs as favorites and therefore forced into my playlists.

Most frustrating, I can search this issue going back at least to 2015 on iTunes. How can this continue to be an issue on iTunes for 10 YEARS??? Why is Apple determining my favorite songs without an option to click it off?? Why is there zero good information on this???