Microsoft Edge can be configured using the setting pages edge://settings. However, some settings are not available in the UI. For instance, you cannot replace the new tab page. You can only configure the content of the page… So, you have to stick with the Edge-like page with news and other stuff you don't care about. Hopefully, you can configure Microsoft Edge using policies. There are multiple ways to configure a policy, but if you only want to configure Edge on your machine you can simply use the registry.
PowerShell
New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" -Name "NewTabPageLocation" -Value "about:blank" -PropertyType String -Force
If you use a dark theme, you can use the following registry key to set the background color to black. The content of the page is <style>*{background:rgb(51,51,51)}</style>, but you need to encode it as base64:
PowerShell
$content = "<style>*{background:rgb(51,51,51)}</style>"
$byte_array = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($content)
$base64 = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String($byte_array) # PHN0eWxlPip7YmFja2dyb3VuZDpyZ2IoNTEsNTEsNTEpfTwvc3R5bGU+
New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" -Name "NewTabPageLocation" -Value "data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,$base64" -PropertyType String -Force
You may need to reload the policy by restarting Edge or using the edge://policy page.
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