Category slugs being appended "category"

I presume this is because the slug already exists elsewhere e.g. I have a page called /solutions/customer-experience and I want the category slug customer-experience, I try to enter it but it gets appended "category" so I get the slug "customer-experience-category".

This problem is further compounded because when I use "remove category base" via yoast's seo tools, it seems to be removing "category" from the appended slug causing 404s.

Is this category behaviour normal? The only ways I see to avoid this would be to either change the page name, or change the default appended word wordpress uses.

Is it possible to have both page "customer-experience" page name and category slug?