Without it you can hold on the space bar to enter a trackpad-type mode, but this is a poor substitute.

With 3D Touch, you could press a little harder than normal anywhere on the keyboard to enter the trackpad mode, but then you could press hard again to switch to word selection mode, which functioned much like a click-and-drag on a trackpad.

Very difficult to describe and admittedly very unintuitive, but once you got the muscle memory down it was so efficient.

I loathe the fact that everything that 3D Touch used to do has been replaced by a long press. Everything feels so sluggish now.