How to enable a bluetooth hotspot with e installed on a fairphone 3?

Interestingly, a search for “bluetooth” in the Settings will indeed give Hotspot & tethering as a result, where the setting should be, but it just isn’t there.

I think your options right now are either raising the issue at /e/'s GitLab or wait for the upcoming Android 10 release to see then whether that might fix the issue.