Damn, almost 28 years on this planet and I've just now learned that there's a very handy separate option for that. Kinda makes sense if you think about it for 5 seconds, but I just never did. I do know how to deal with images properly though, so I'm not a complete idiot.
FR man. I spent 2 days trying to get an image to take up the whole of page 1 in a document but couldn't make it work so ended up just printing the photo out and stapling it to the rest of the document
PSA: Word isn't layout software, it's a WYSIWYG document editor. You can change settings to make it work more like layout software, but it's better to use a layout tool if you need that.
Recently I switched to using Affinity Publisher because it did everything I needed from InDesign. The only problem being, if I want to share files with anyone, I have to make sure they also have Affinity Publisher.
If youre adding images to a word document, you should be using publisher, not word. Thats like deciding to edit a video with photoshop instead of premiere. You could, just super inefficient.