Visual Studio is not removing files even when specifying to remove them

I have a VS solution which includes multiple folders I’m porting from the classic csproj to the new modern csproj style. One of my package references include some DLLs as part of its dependencies. I’m intending to leave it targeting .netfx for now, but I would ideally like to avoid having these files included since they are noisy and

I tried to content remove them:

      <ItemGroup>
        <Content Remove="C:\Users\**\concrt140.dll" />
      </ItemGroup>

To no avail.

I also tried:

<PropertyGroup>
  <EnableDefaultItems>false</EnableDefaultItems>
</PropertyGroup>

And it does not work as well. What could be going on here?