Cannot remove the field “Name” from the lead form?

Problem: On the lead entity we only want to have the customer field (account or contact) and remove the field “Name” (fullname).  If we try to remove the field from the form, we are getting an error:

The field itself is marked as optional:

So why can we not remove the field from the form?

Solution: The fullname is a composite field of two fields: “firstname” and “lastname”. If one field of a composite field is marked as required the hole composite field will be required on the form. (it doesn’t matter if the field is required or not.)

In our case it was the field “lastname” which was marked as required. After changing that to “optional”, we could successfully remove the field from the form.