I've often thought that this is actually a fundamental failure in mouse-and-screen based UI that we sadly didn't catch early enough in the design of the desktop. One of the mouse buttons should be dedicated to text selection and able to select any text. Document contents, browser contents, the text in an error message or a button... It should all be selectable and there should be a dedicated button for it. That frees up the other buttons to only ever mean "interact with something interactable."
(No suggestions for how we'd do this in touch; touch just has a different metaphor).
I've often thought that this is actually a fundamental failure in mouse-and-screen based UI that we sadly didn't catch early enough in the design of the desktop. One of the mouse buttons should be dedicated to text selection and able to select any text. Document contents, browser contents, the text in an error message or a button... It should all be selectable and there should be a dedicated button for it. That frees up the other buttons to only ever mean "interact with something interactable."
(No suggestions for how we'd do this in touch; touch just has a different metaphor).