Safari tabs are lost after merging windows on iPadOS

I posted a while ago about having lost tabs on Safari on my iPad for the umpteenth time:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252469764

Developers should be able to recreate this issue themselves if they’re interested in fixing it.

It happens every time you create a split-screen window and choose “merge all windows”. After doing this, several hours later, tabs opened more than 24 hours ago are gone with no way to reopen them: They don’t appear on the “recently closed tabs” list, and disappear even if you have “automatically close tabs” set to manual.

It has been raised numerous times since at least Oct 2019:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251931419

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250843144

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250781864

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251260210

I never use the split-screen thing because it’s so glitchy, but it’s very easy to create an instance accidentally. This time, when that happened, I knew that it would kill my tabs so I bookmarked all my current open tabs as suggested by the very helpful user LotusPilot (For ref; hold bookmark icon, “Add bookmark for X tabs”, as advised here: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250002077. You can also apparently disable split-screen in Settings > Homescreen & Dock > Multitasking > Allow Multiple Apps)

I have no doubt that I can recreate this issue - which has frustrates me to no end - by doing the same thing again. Are developers aware that the split-screen feature causes this problem?