I do more writing on my iPhone (it's the one with the largest screen) than I do on a computer. I can do about 40wpm. To move the cursor you just hold down on the space bar. These complaints kind of sound like someone from the 90's saying that the close window button is on the wrong side
Just yesterday I had to edit something on an iPhone. I finally managed to put the cursor at the front to add a word before what was there already. But when I started typing, auto correct (or whatever) put the cursor back at the end of the word. I ended up just removing everything and typing from scratch because figuring out Apple logic behind such a behavior just wasn't on the agenda.
40wpm is 33% less than what a bad typist can do. Repeating "just hold down the space bar" doesn't make it behave any less erratically. We had Palm Pilots in the 90s and they ran on AAA batteries and editing text on them was certainly more consistent than the current state of iOS.
It's not "just", because you have to switch from the more natural "tap where you want to edit" to a separate gesture, which also takes longer and is less precise. You might also use a different keyboard with better layout/symbol visibility that doesn't support this gesture