Pages losing cursor

Save your Pages docs to iCloud, do not remove them.

Create a Pages doc in your User folder, Macintosh HD/Users, or duplicate and save an existing doc to that folder and work on it to see if the cursor problem goes away, like mine did.

If you can work that way, great. Just save the edited document in your User folder back to your iCloud Drive folder so that it is backed up.

Docs that are stored in iCloud may not be on your hard drive, so be careful about deleting them.

I had the same exact issue running Catalina on a Mac Mini and Pages 8.2. The issue also appeared in Numbers 6.2, and the Format bar and cursor on both apps would disappear at the same moment. I just finished a total of about four hours on the phone with Apple and the issue seems resolved, for now. In brief, what seemed to fix it was going to System Preferences/Users-Groups/Login Items and deleting all the login items that had warning ! signs or slash logos and then restarting the Mac (for about the twelfth time). I also deleted other Login items that I knew I no longer needed. Pages and Numbers seem stable now, and Keynote never exhibited the problem, which suggests Pages and Numbers are more vulnerable to background scripts. If the problem recurs, I will observe it along with the Activity Monitor for clues before I call Apple back. Hope this helps.

Update: The problem seemed solved for two days, and then it reappeared. I deleted the one remaining Login Item, as described above, and restarted, but then the cursor disappeared even more frequently. Unable to use the Pages program now, as the cursor will often disappear before I can type anything. I launched Activity Monitor, but was unable to identify activity that was contemporaneous with the problem. I have another call with Apple scheduled tomorrow.

After several more hours with a very patient and helpful Pages advisor, we discovered that the problem only occurs in documents that are in folders backed up to iCloud.

If I work on a document on my local drive, no problem. The next corrective option is to format my Mac Mini and reinstall the OS, an extensive process. If that didn't fix it, there was an error message following a restart that he said may suggest a hardware problem. Since all else in my computer is working fine, I have opted just to work on local Pages and Numbers documents and then save them to an iCloud folder.

Ideally, we shouldn't have to be doing this workaround. I think it's a software problem, but don't know why it affects particular machines. I will do what makes the workaround simpler, maybe opening two finder windows and just dragging the docs to the working location and back to the storage location. It's inconvenient, but at least Pages works!