Safari trackpad swipe gesture navigates back and loses typed content

Safari "side-swiping" reversal? I've been using the Mac since before System 7, so it makes me a troglodyte. But in the past I've always relied on Apple software to just work, simply and intuitively. Kind of in the same way that I usually don't need to read the full instructions to assemble something. But it feels like a few years ago Apple entered this phase of "Father knows best", where they decide universally to add features that customers didn't really want, need or ask for. Case in point that "always on" display on the iPhone, that thankfully they finally gave us the option to turn it off.

And that's the issue at heart. Apple software engineers have a penchant for "improving the functionality out of their apps". Pages, Mail, Photos and such are notorious for these quirks. But Safari is why I'm asking this question. Sometimes I'll be typing something in a text field on a web page, and I'll mistakenly swipe my finger across the trackpad to the left, and suddenly I'm back on the previous page. And no amount of swiping and "hand wringing" lets me get back to the page I was typing on. And if I do, all that typing I had done is gone, like I hadn't even done it. So I suspect this is one of those features that Apple did as a "favor" to us users, and the only way I'd know about it is by reading a multi-page document instead of just using the software.

So if there's an intuitive trick to get back my page of typing, or to disable this annoying feature, please tell me. And maybe drop Apple an email and tell them that "improving the functionality out of their apps" isn't that Steve Jobs didn't mean "Think In-different".