You can turn the recommendations off by going into the "Settings" on the left side of the home page and scroll down to "Home Screen" and you'll see there are many things there you can disable from showing. Go to the "Recommendation Rows" and select "Hide" and they'll disappear.
Unfortunately even when you do this Roku still likes to turn the rows back on occasionally or add a new specific row and have it on by default. I'm constantly going back to this setting and disabling any new annoyance that Roku forces.
Roku is so obsessed with pushing nonsense like this that it is making a lot of people frustrated. The fact that they won't leave it off when you disable it shows that Roku doesn't care about how you want to configure the settings on your Roku device that you paid for.
