For what it's worth, text selection has been badly broken on iOS for at least a decade and autocorrect has been steadily getting worse for probably the same amount of time, and these are features that affect the mainstream segment of Apple users on a daily basis. Apple seems generally happy to let bugs go unaddressed for years and years regardless of how many people they affect or how often.
I seem to have it working just fine, though am not sure how I may have configured it to do such, without dedicating such to memory.
I’ve seen an insane drop in the quality of swipe typing recently as well. To the point where I’ll often go back to regular typing. I’ve made maybe six or more corrections just to this paragraph alone.
and it drives me crazy too.
I've just had good luck it seems with text select.
Have you found any way to do a Find within a span of text on iOS? That would be very useful, but I haven't seen it.