Query block – don’t display current post

I have a news category setup for posts, and after the post, I want to display a continue reading section to display 3 more posts in this category. I set this up using a Query block in a block element, but I could not get the query block to skip the current post. Although I set the category and specified exclude current post in the query block, I couldn’t get it to work. The query block skpped the current post but displayed a post that was not in the news category I had specified.

After doing much research, I found this code snippet which appears to work, and I set the ID for the news category in this snippet:

add_filter( ‘generateblocks_query_loop_args’, function( $query_args, $attributes ) {
// Intercept our targeted Query Block using its custom class name
if ( ! empty( $attributes[‘className’] ) && strpos( $attributes[‘className’], ‘strict-single-category-exclude’ ) !== false ) {

// 1. SAFE EXCLUSION: Pull the ID of the article currently being read
$current_post_id = get_the_ID();
if ( $current_post_id ) {
$query_args[‘post__not_in’] = isset( $query_args[‘post__not_in’] ) ? (array) $query_args[‘post__not_in’] : array();
$query_args[‘post__not_in’][] = $current_post_id;
}

// 2. STRICT TAXONOMY QUERY: Force GenerateBlocks to fetch only from the news category which has an id of 295
$query_args[‘tax_query’] = array(
array(
‘taxonomy’ => ‘category’,
‘field’ => ‘term_id’,
‘terms’ => array( 295 ),
‘operator’ => ‘IN’,
),
);

}

return $query_args;
}, 10, 2 );

My question is this: Is this the correct way to set this up? Why doesn’t the query block allow me to set a category but exclude the current post? It seems to require this php snippet to get it to work.