Even if I turn this annoyance off under "Sequence" it comes back on as default when I restart PPro. And I have to restart every 3 or 4 minutes because PPro crashes or misbehaves so often!

If we can't prevent it from turning itself on randomly, it would be great to be able to add a button above the timeline that indicates if Selection Follows Playhead is turned on or off. Then you could easily see when the feature is on or off, and set it to what you need in the moment.

I can't believe this problem is still a thing.

Adobe Please! You should really add this ON-OFF feature to the workspace saved settings so that when you save the workspace with the "Selection Follows Playhead"- OFF, it should remain OFF until you put it back ON again.

They should make it part of the saved settings. Having this preference turned on automatically every time I start a new project or even open a saved one in which it was previously turned off drives me mad.

Would also love more preferences for this setting. Having an option for it to select all video and audio tracks that the playhead is on would streamline labelling during logging stages of projects and make my life 20x easier

Selection Follows Playhead can be annoying.
But I set its shortcut to CTRL P, and just hit that anytime it appears, but I don't want it. This has worked fine for me.
Though I can understand that if it seemingly randomly turns itself on a LOT, that could get pretty annoying.
But look at this form the other perspective. Someone who WANTS to use the feature, now has to know that this additional preference exists, and know to enable the preference if someone disabled it... AND then enable the menu option.
So then, we're gonna get someone on this forum saying "Why the heck do I have to turn on 'selection follows playhead' TWICE just to get it to work??"
I don't have a solution to this potential conundrum. but I've gained a bit more respect for the precarious balancing act that the adobe devs must perform, after looking through all these feature suggestions... many of which could be resolved if only the user knew a bit more about how to use Premiere.
ADOBE, IF YOU'RE READING THIS:
I do still want a shortcut for "select top (non-disabled) clip at playhead" which will function independently from "selection follows playhead."

also it turns on automatically if you activate the lumetri panel at any time no matter what workspace your in. it is still annoying even know that. I also wish you could force off that option in preferences.

In my experience, this setting is baked into individual projects. If I work off a template project where the setting is turned off, it doesn't seem to randomly turn on for me. And when I encounter other peoples' projects with the setting turned on, I use a shortcut to turn it off.