Is there any configuration not to use index merge in mariadb, if a cardinality of an index is below than that?

There is a table have 2 indexes, called state and CATEGORY, which has a very low cardinality respectively 4 and 24 within 7,110,590 rows in the table. When running query of select statements that includes above 2 indexes in where clause, an optimizer try to index merge, Using intersect(state,CATEGORY), that is less efficient than even table scan, takes about 20 sec. Is there any way to except a index if the cardinality of the index is lower than a specific directed number when an optimizer is about to make a execution plan? The database is MariaDB-1:10.6.11 Community version But other databases which has lower version than previous mentioned database server, 10.3.28-MariaDB, handles the same query in 5ms. Servers of older version run a table scan using high cardinality index(date). All mentioned servers are same replicas of a source database with slightly different versions. Depends on difference of their version, their optimizers create query that have a lot of difference in performance. What factors could bring that difference? --- Full explain extended in newer version having low performance

id 1
select_type SIMPLE
table that_table
type index_merge
possible_keys CATEGORY,state
key state,CATEGORY
key_len 6,152
ref NULL
rows 1778388
filtered 100
Extra
Using intersect(state,CATEGORY); Using where; Using filesort

--- Full explain extended in old version having good performance

id 1
select_type SIMPLE
table that_table
type index
possible_keys CATEGORY,state
key DATE
key_len 62
ref NULL
rows 18
filtered 100
Extra Using where

--- Below is indexes on the table

# cardinality: 24, CATEGORY VARCHAR(50) DEFAULT '' NOT 
CREATE INDEX CATEGORY ON that_table (CATEGORY) ; 


# cardinality: 4, state VARCHAR(1) DEFAULT 'Y' NULL;
CREATE INDEX state ON that_table (state);

# cardinality: 7,110,590, DATE VARCHAR(20) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL;
CREATE INDEX DATE ON that_table (DATE);

--- The problematic query:

EXPLAIN EXTENDED
SELECT *
FROM that_table
WHERE category = 'blabla'
  AND state = 'Y'
ORDER BY date DESC
LIMIT 9;

--- A definition of table

CREATE TABLE that_table (
     UID int(10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
     state varchar(1) DEFAULT 'Y',
     CATEGORY varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
     DATE varchar(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',

     # .... other columns
     
     PRIMARY KEY (UID),
     KEY DATE (DATE),
     KEY CATEGORY (CATEGORY),
     KEY state (state),

     # ... other indexes
);