you can enable cursor control by holding space, and then you can move to selection mode by touching anywhere else on the keyboard.

You have to be very precise with your finger drags because it loves snapping back to the original position. Gbroard doesn’t suffer from this. Part of the reason is it doesn’t do the “free-floating” cursor thing - which I’ve never understood the point of anyway. It’s fancy but useless in 99% of cases on a phone.

Doesn't work for me like it used to since update 26.1. Its now extremely hard to get that to work.