You are not alone. I've spent a lot of time over the years configuring Emacs not to split the frame unless I explicit ask for a split with C-x 2 (which I do very rarely). The first 6 ways I found to do it stopped working over the 33 years I've been using Emacs, so now I'm on version 7, which consists of (setq display-buffer-alist '((".*" (display-buffer-same-window)))) plus my own definition of compilation-goto-locus.

If I were a better Emacs citizen, I would lobby the maintainers to fix compilation-goto-locus so that it obeys display-buffer-alist like every other part of Emacs (that I know about, except for the *Completions* buffer, which does not need to be fixed IMHO because the *Completions* window reliably deletes itself when the user aborts or exits the minibuffer).