I agree that this is a terrible flaw.
I accidentally deleted a paragraph by tapping a word twice to highlight it and somehow the computer detected 3 taps, highlighted the whole paragraph and replaced it with the letter “c”. I must have been touching my mouse pad with the edge of my wrist while I started typing the replacement word which started with c.
Anyway, I got most of my paragraph back by going to file>info>versions. If you click “manage versions”, you will see the autosaved files word has been making for you every five minutes. Open the most recent autosaved file, and copy your deleted text back from there. This trick saved me about an hour of work. Hope it works for others.