You commented months ago but maybe you still have this problem.
I kept learning you can't remove that irritating head rest until I found a YouTube video showing how to do it. It works great until you discover the head rest is, nonsensically, the primary way the seat back is attached to the seat.
So I turned it around and put it back in. There's a trick to it but it's pretty easy to do yourself. You just need to get the head rest lined up while pressing firmly on the seat back, so that the poles of the head rest fall into the holsters of the seat back again. It can be kind of a crowded 3 hands operation since you really need the seat reclined pretty far to get the head rest back in. But, definitely something you can do yourself with little risk.
Once reinserted backwards, that head rest no longer cramps my neck and no longer leaves me in a dangerous situation with a big gap between my neck and the seat back - that was a serious danger in case of rear end collision when it was facing forwards. The head rest has less padding facing this way, but still has padding, so fears of it being unpadded when flipped around like this are unwarranted.