iPhone deleting tab-specific history by itself for no reason

I’ve had this problem for a long time but before it was infrequently enough to be no more than a mild inconvenience. However, recently it’s gotten so bad that I cannot use safari at all.

I will be using safari, switching between multiple tabs as I always open links in new tabs so I can avoid going back and forth as safari is very slow to load most of the time. I will search for something, say, “Apple Watch blue case”, and as I’m looking through the photo results, opening the ones I want to look at more closely in new tabs, often looking at the “related to” photos shown below the photo I’ve clicked on, all of a sudden I’m stuck on that photo and cannot go back to the previous one, to the results page, anything. I rarely, if ever, close tabs and have long histories attached to tabs as I leave them open and just use the url box to go to wherever I need next time I open safari. The back button will be completely greyed out, and the last several pages I visited literally seconds before will have just vanished from the history log. The history from 2 minutes ago is still there, the history from the tan I had just been using is still there, everything up to the last time this happened is there. I’m just completely unable to recover where I’ve just been.

I have had iPhones since 2012 and have never once had my settings set to delete history automatically, I keep everything, messages, photos, history, call logs, voicemails, etc. my settings have not changed and I’ve made certain that that is not the issue. No one else touches my phone, I don’t have any other apple devices tied to my iCloud that are being used by me or anyone else, my storage is not full, and I don’t use incognito mode. I’m using an iPhone 11 on iOS 15.4, literally updated yesterday so as far as I can tell there’s nothing I could be doing that could be causing this problem. I have always been a heavy user and up until the past couple years have never had this issue. Chrome doesn’t do this, my computer doesn’t do this, etc. I’ve restarted the app, rebooted my connection, rebooted my phone, I’ve performed many many hard resets and 3 full blown restores over the last 8 months or so, and this issue has persisted and gotten worse.

I do not want to switch browsers as I use specific browsers for specific purposes, safari being my main browser that I use for my day to day tasks. I already have chrome set aside for things that require a lot of tabs, and I have all my bookmarks and history and accounts tied to safari that I need access to. Besides that, there’s simply no reason someone should have to stop using a utility that literally comes with the device and should work as expected already.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do about it, and when searching for a solution to solve the problem myself like I usually do, find nothing helpful or specific to what’s happening to me.