Direct touch exploration broken across multiple apps

I have an iPhone 15 running iOS 26.7.1, and I've noticed that direct touch exploration has stopped working properly across multiple apps. For anyone unfamiliar with the terminology, direct touch exploration refers to the ability to locate an onscreen element by placing your finger on it instead of swiping to it. My first experience with this issue was in the ChatGPT app a couple of weeks ago, when I realized that I couldn't locate content in my conversations by touching the screen. VoiceOver would give me a focus click if I tried to interact with the area where the prompts and responses should have been displayed, but wouldn't actually read anything unless I found the input field at the bottom and swiped backwards. I have a support ticket open with OpenAI'S help desk and am waiting to hear back from a human engineer.
Well, this morning I opened up the Shop app by Shopify, and noticed that i can no longer locate any of the primary page contents by direct touch exploration. I can get a focus click from VoiceOver, but again it won't actually read anything unless I swipe through the screen one element at a time. Now I'm not sure whether this is just a sucky coincidence, bad accessibility regression testing from both companies, or something to do with the fact that I'm not on the latest version of iOS. I know others have been having problems with the ChatGPT app, but I'm wondering if anyone has been seeing this come up in other apps as well.