Eliminate Media URLS?

Only today did I notice that a page is generated for each media object. Perhaps there’s a good reason for this, though I can’t think of one, but it’s become a problem for me because I just noticed a spam comment on a page with that media object.

So I’d like to know how to either eliminate all these pages, or, if that’s not possible, render them publicly inaccessible. There’s nothing in settings that screams out to me as an obvious fix.

I saw a thread here from four years ago touching on this issue, but figured I’d ask again because four years is a long time and there may be a newer, easier solution.