Yes the automatic highlighting of selected word is a quality of life feature and originally what I was going to request. Glad I’m not the only one wanting it and hopefully it gets implemented!

On the ipad I found that you can search for a word then click outside the dialog (or just press cmd + f again) to see all highlighted occurrences. This works as an interim solution for me at least.

Yes please! It allows me to easily see all the instances of a variable and where/what the code is doing with it. Doing that helps me quickly analyze code. Certain cases it’s also faster for quickly renaming versus replace all.