In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was.
I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.
Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.
You're awfully arrogant in making a judgement about my empathy... if you want to make this personal.
Or maybe you can justify why people need to be able to select menu labels in the first place? That's not standard on any OS I've ever used, so it's up to the person who wants to change things to justify why.
Maybe be less judgmental of people here on HN, and contribute something factual instead? I at least gave a factual account of my personal experience, which is a data point. Describing one's experience isn't egoism.
At least in recent versions of Android there is that OCR (?) powered functionality to select text when you're in switch-app view.
I would suggest that these days you'd be much better off taking a screenshot and putting that into Google Translate.
That way all the text remains in-place, and you can keep it as a visual reference to refer to.
If you were selecting text, it would wind up in a kind of jumble that would be much harder to use.
Disabling text selection is not just worse UX, it is actively user-hostile