Totally agreed. Specifically, I can never get the “ants” that should show up when you select something. It’s an ongoing bug that was just never fixed. So I just have to remember that a thing is selected. Quite irritating.
The "ants" got fixed sometime in the past few months, I believe, and thank goodness: it really did make GIMP almost impossible to use for anything complicated enough to need GIMP. (But they've been working on my M1 Mac for a while now.)