VoiceOver focus regressions in iOS 26

I generally like to provide as specific feedback here as possible, but this one is tough because it seems to be more of a broad issue I’m experiencing on my iPhone SE since I upgraded from iOS 18 to iOS 26. Basically, I can describe a pattern that I’m experiencing throughout many apps and areas of the operating system. You’ll interact with an item – Messages in the Messages app, an email in the Mail app, any given item in a collection, like a list, etc. Previously, once you interacted with that thing and gave it a second for voiceover focus to catch up, focus with land back on the item you just interacted with. So for a specific example, I want to react to an iMessage. I hold down on the iMessage, I choose a reaction, say thumbs up, from the tapback picker, and I let my finger off the screen. Normally, focus with land back on that message, read it aloud again and include in its read out the reaction I just added. Now voiceover just… Sits there, lost. It’s one of those things where when I first upgraded to iOS 26, I thought it more or less felt the same as iOS 18, but the more I use it, the more I realize things are just a tad worse than they were before with voiceover, in many areas.