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You did it wrong. In a vector drawing program, you do not change colors using the bucket fill. You should learn to use a tool before complaining it does not work.

And just another FYI, but you need to remember that an SVG is a structured document, where the structure may or not be obviously reflected in how it is rendered. I'm not sure which SVG you were playing with, but for instance if I grab https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Politica... and then ungroup the top level (or 2nd level on some objects) I can easily select whole countries "colour" and manipulate and change them. And that particular file has grouped non-contiguous nations like Indonesia or Australia properly associating the islands. But as others have said here - your issue is nothing to with Inkscape but the SVG you have chosen and how you expect it to behave.

Vector images are nothing like bitmap images. You can't take bucket fill and use it like you would in Paint. What you did, it seems, is you used a bucket fill on a group of objects, setting their fill to the same color.

For what it does, Inkscape is one of the very few usable, large open source tools. It has the same problems other OSS projects do (suboptimal UI being one) but it's not tool's fault you expected behavior that's at odds with vector graphics.