Josh Wardle said on a podcast[1] that him and his partner chose the set of words by taking all 5 letter words in the dictionary and filtering out the "bogus" ones. He then randomized the order of these words so that him and his partner could play. However, I'm not sure if the New York Times has changed how word selection works.
[1] https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle
This advice applies much better to Wordle than it does to Quordle, though. Quordle gives you nine guesses. Four of them are already taken by the need to provide four answers. Three or four go to your fixed opener. That leaves you either one or two discretionary guesses. If your opener ended up giving you trouble with more than one word, you're basically hosed.
But I've found the same applied with Quordle. Recently I had _LARE and even that allows FLARE, GLARE and BLARE. It turns out solving another word (BRINE) eliminated one of the options for free.
I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words. Like I've ended up with S_ILL before leaving SPILL, SKILL, STILL and SHILL.