Sitemap redirecting to homepage

Hello,

I have launched a new website recently and switch over to Rank Math. But now I’m confused about the following:

Google searches are still displaying older pages and content that doesn’t exist anymore. I guess that’s normal and they will go away after some time. So, in the meantime, whoever clicked on these links was  taken to a 404 error page. Sp, I thought it would be a good idea to set in the general settings of Rank Math for Fallback Behavior to “Redirect to Homepage”. I was happy with this, because I could see that, after that,  these old links will at least take the user to my homepage. I was using it correctly, right?

Anyway, the problem is that, right after doing this I discovered that now, when typing my xml sitemap URL in the browser this will automatically redirect me to my homepage every single time. Which I guess is not a normal behavior at all and maybe even caused further problems with indexing of my site. So, I switch off the “redirect to Homepage” and now is set to Default 404, which is a pity because, as said, I was happy using it for the reason mentioned above
But I wonder, how and why did this happen? Shouldn’t I be able to use the  “redirect to Homepage” and not affect the sitemap?   Maybe there’s something wrong with my sitemap. Can you please look into it? You can see the URL of my sitemap in the sensitive data input field.

Any help will be much appreciated.