Apple lets you do this, too, but it's really not better than Swype's method. The Gboard/Apple method resembles the description in
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about radios that could be tuned by pointing - "[it] meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme." Take your finger off the screen too roughly and you get a last little bit of motion.
That's not necessarily an everyone problem, but for all the people who complain about how big phones are and how they would like a smaller one, I have big hands and find an iPhone Pro Max to be a comfortable one-handed fit (I also found the OG Xbox "Duke" controller quite comfortable).
On Swype, you could click over two spaces to the right, or left, or up, and konw that it wouldn't move.
Did I mention the Swype key? Swype-A, Z, X, C, V worked exactly like you expected from computers. Swype-space did something, maybe bring up the edit board? Capitalize a word by going up above the keyboard before finishing the word, and double a letter (as vs ass, for example) by squiggling around on it before moving on to the next letter.
It had one fault for most of its life: the word "me", which is very common especially in text messaging, was frequently interpreted as "nee", which given that I'm not a wedding planner doesn't come up often. And yet even that was better than the horrendous Apple swipe misread that gives me "Abbas" when I mean "and". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian politician, and he's not in my contact list. And I don't ever write about him except to complain that Apple just keeps doing this substitution.