one analogy might be the "cut and accumulate" feature in nano (and probably others) where a line is removed and appended to the clipboard, then you can paste and all those lines will be pasted off the clipboard at once. You could do that at a character level in the shell, if you wanted. No idea if any shells do though.
Now this got me thinking: the main problem with terminal is that it doesn't seem to support "cut" (and consequently, "paste to replace selection"). So re-arranging a command string is always gonna be a pain regardless the complexity.
I can see why it was this way historically, but not exactly sure why no modern terminal emulator gives this feature, even as optional.