Indeed, I noticed that if I disable auto-correct then keep using very simple words, and short messages, I have much less problems.
Of course, answering with emojis mean no risk of typos.
Really the only downside is having to put a bit of effort into learning it, but for the amount of time I personally spend typing on the phone over the years, it's well worth it.
I also tried other keyboard formats. 8pen was kind of interesting, but I could never get it very consistent myself, it felt more like a gimmick.
I'll second the recommendation.
[0]: http://www.8pen.com/
Often I'm trying to type in names of wines, domaines, vineyards, etc. - the CellarTracker app is probably the destination of the majority of my keystrokes. I could swear sometimes that the wrong character got entered even though I was pretty sure I hit the right key.
And of course now I'll be hypersensitive to this possibility, and cherry-pick evidence to confirm my suspicions.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/iphone-keyboard-learns-what-you-ty...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
[2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...