It sounds like phab:T226708 is getting fixed because of you. Thanks.
Topic on User talk:Deryck Chan
You're welcome! It's my privilege to be the extra volunteer voice that tipped the balance...!
While we're here, I've recently found a related problem: VE doesn't seem to distinguish between the inside and the outside of a link when the caret is placed immediately after the last character of the link text!
This is a problem for Chinese and Japanese languages (zh, ja, yue, wuu, lzh) which do not put whitespace between phrases. So it is quite common for us to need to insert new text immediately up against the end of a link, or even shove two links directly up against each other without any whitespace in between. In source editing this would not have been a problem because the square brackets mark boundaries clearly.
VE users in this languages have a reliable workaround at the moment: insert a spurious ASCII space character to tell VE that I want to write something outside the link, insert the new text, and then delete the ASCII space. But now that we're in the process of changing caret behaviour to cope with single-character links, please consider putting two caret positions at the boundary between link text and the text after the link, one position inside the link and the other position outside the link, and for text added in the "outside" position to not be treated as additions to the link text.
VE should already work the way you describe – we distinguish cursor position inside and outside of a link with the blue highlight, and when you navigate using arrow keys, these are in fact two separate caret positions.
Here's a quick recording I made demonstrating this on zh.wp page 蒙娜丽莎: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X6GptGT9j6YZJs0_M-U5dXJOPyLd1yFa/view. If it doesn't work for you, can you give us more detail or a video of the problem?
You're right. I tried re-creating this behaviour again today and couldn't, and got the correct behaviour. I shall retract this report.
I'm glad that it's working again. Thanks for the update.