That sounds a lot like T281771: Prevent contenteditabe like experiences (cursor placement; menu selection for cutting text) in AddLinkArticleTarget (cc @mewoph), the patch we ended up with there only adjusted the mobile toolbar dialog but it should probably also apply to the desktop one.

iPadOS has desktop user agent so desktop site will be loaded by default. When the same changes from mobile are applied, a few odd issues came up:

1. The font size of the article text is increased to 24px (from 14px). The font sizes on the annotation views are inconsistent. Oddly the computed style on the paragraph node has the same calculation (0.875 * 1em).
2. When navigating between annotations, the focus state remains on the previous button that was clicked.

Change 694587 had a related patch set uploaded (by MewOphaswongse; author: MewOphaswongse):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Add a link: Prevent virtual keyboard from showing up when desktop site is loaded on tablet

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/694587

Change 694587 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Add a link: Prevent virtual keyboard from showing up when desktop site is loaded on tablet

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/694587