Judging by what OP is describing this isn't a bug, it's a functionality change they thought was better. And they might even be right for the majority of users. But OP has a valid use case that's broken by the change.
There’s an XKCD for everything:
Don’t go be being all reasonable, we’re trying to be Reddit here for a minute.
Yea, the problem is Apple thought this was an UI improvement, but actually broke a common usage pattern. This kind of change should definitely be a setting, and considered thoroghly before changing the default. This is poor design and lack of QA, not a bug, per se. But the result is even worse because it means the previous functionality likely isn't coming back.