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Can you please check your template? If your template is setting the generator tag during its initialisation or, worse, has a hard-coded generator tag then yes, you will not be able to use Admin Tools because your template is doing something Joomla frowns upon and considers wrong. Admin Tools' feature works when the meta generator tag is set correctly in Joomla's HtmlDocument object.

The ByeByeGenerator plugin is, as far as I know, post-processing the HTML generated by the template using regular expressions to remove the generator tag. This has two problems. One, it is incredibly slow — we are talking about a good 10 milliseconds added to a page response time that's otherwise under 500 milliseconds. The second problem is that this kind of plugin also kicks in when there is no HTML output which can indeed screw up third party modules, plugins, and components. That's why we did not go that way.

It is not a feature for the .htaccess file. The .htaccess file is read by the web server.

The feature to tell Joomla to set a different generator meta tag already exists and you already found it.

Setting the generator to NULL IS NOT ALLOWED; IT IS A BUG WHICH WILL BREAK JOOMLA UNDER NEWER PHP 8 VERSIONS. Ever since Joomla 1.7.0 the setGenerator argument is documented as a string (not string|null). Likewise, the internal _generator property and the getGenerator method of the same \Joomla\CMS\Document\Document class are documented as string. Joomla 5 will increase the minimum PHP version to 8.1 which means that the properties in these objects will eventually become typed and have the correct visibility, i.e. protected string $_generator instead of public $_generator. The methods will also get scalar type hints so it will be public function setGenerator(string $generator): void instead of public function setGenerator($generator). Care to guess what idiotically doing ->setGenerator(null) does? Yeah, it makes Joomla fail with an ErrorException. So of course we are NOT going to do that.

Joomla requires a generator tag. For the reason please refer to \Joomla\CMS\Document\Document::getMetaData.

The correct way to address it is by setting a fake / nondescript generator tag using the feature we already provide. Removing it doesn't protect you any more than using a fake one. The whole point is whether your CMS type can be found from a simple Google search.