REQUIREMENTS FOR DISABLING EMAIL FEEDBACK FORWARDING

You're correct that to disable email feedback forwarding in Amazon SES, you must first set up an alternative method to receive bounce and complaint notifications. This is a requirement - you cannot simply turn off email feedback forwarding without having another notification method in place.

Regarding your options:

Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a messaging service that can send notifications to various endpoints, including email addresses. When you set up SNS topics for bounces and complaints, Amazon SES will publish notifications to these topics instead of forwarding them as emails to your Return-Path address. You can then subscribe an email address to these SNS topics to receive the notifications. So yes, the bounces would go to whatever email address you subscribe to the SNS topic, rather than being emailed back to your original sender address.

Event Publishing is another method where you can send bounce, complaint, delivery, and other email events to either an SNS topic or a Kinesis Data Firehose stream. If you use event publishing, you must apply the configuration set containing the event publishing rule to each email you send.

The key difference: With SNS topic notifications, you're setting up notification endpoints at the identity level (for your verified email address or domain). With event publishing, you're using configuration sets that you apply to individual emails.

For your use case where your CRM handles bounces and unsubscribes, setting up SNS topics for bounces and complaints would be the simpler approach. Once you have SNS topics configured for both bounces and complaints, you can then disable email feedback forwarding. The category dropdown you're seeing is likely for organizing your SNS topics, but this is just for your own organizational purposes within AWS.

Important: You must configure SNS topics for BOTH bounces AND complaints before you can disable email feedback forwarding.
Sources
Receiving Amazon SES notifications through email - Amazon Simple Email Service
Amazon SES notifications sent by email - Amazon Simple Email Service
SetIdentityFeedbackForwardingEnabled - Amazon Simple Email Service