I have a workaround for this bug that seems to work. Sharing it in hopes of helping others...
So it seems this bad behavior occurs (in my case anyway) when you wrap a NavigationView with other custom UI. In my case I had a custom tab bar view which wrapped a NavigationView.
Sometimes the content inside the NavigationView would become completely unresponsive to user interaction but the custom tab bar would remain functional.
Now for the workaround:
I found that if I set the custom tab bar view to disabled(true) then focus would be forced to change back to the NavigationView. So a workaround would be to temporarily disable all of the custom UI surrounding the NavigationView then re-enable it. You'd have to get creative with making this work reliably--something like a periodic async timer that enables/disables stuff. I'm still figuring out the best solution for my app. Just thought I'd share.
This is a complete mess. It can not be controlled, and documentation of this use case is pretty nonexistent.
I'm tying to use an SwiftUI framework on Mac that has many dependencies to UIColor, so Mac Catalayst is the only way to go. Trying to get that running with the Document based App template is a total mess, and the focus issue complete destroys the interactivity of the interface randomly. Drag operations seem to be particularly vulnerable.