I've used android phones since I've had modern smartphones and I've had a similar experience. The built in keyboard by google/aosp was always flaky and, especially on small screens, a pain to use. I'll describe my keyboard journey and what ups and owns I experienced on android here:
After using the built in keyboard for a while came swipe-typing and it was a lot better, but still limiting. To this day I believe that swipe-typing still hasn't reached its full potential, but the keyboards that focused on it seem to gravitate back towards hybrid regular typing and swiping which in my opinion removes many advantages it had before, making continuous use somewhat awkward.
The next step in my keyboard journey was fleksy. Fleksy was built much like the apple keyboard, in that the keyboard would look where exactly you pressed (not only the key you actually hit) and try to correlate the most likely word from that, powered by a a personal word frequency statistic lookup. It worked so well that they introduced an "invisible keyboard" mode which did exactly what it said on the box, and even without visible keyboard it would work almost perfectly, that's how good their system was. The other controls where designed around their algorithm, it was highly encouraged to, instead of correct something inside of a word, just delete everything and re-write, much like you'd do on a computer where it's much faster to just ^w^w^w^w then to go back and correct that one letter. In addition, they had gestures to cycle through the other likely predicted words their engine determined from your touches.
Unfortunately, fleksy had trouble raking in money and so the nice thing they had went the way every piece of venture capital software goes, which is down the drain. They began adding ever more things that began nagging away at their core competency until at some point they ventured to a joint ios/android app, a total rewrite. At that point they also introduced machine learning and made away with their previous engine, lowering the prediction quality noticably.
It was at that point that I decided to switch to another app and went f-droid only, because if fleksy would've been free software I could've just taken the source and maintain it myself whenever google decided to break an api it uses.
Currently I use florisboard, a fork of the aosp keyboard with some changes like the swipe behaviour of the space bar and selective deletion using backspace swiping. It's not fancy, typing hurts sometimes, but at least it doesn't try to be smart. Software that tries to be smart and fails is much worse than software that doesn't try.