Can Someone Help Me Figure Out Some Tool Ops - Web Ai beta?

I'm completely new to working in any kind of Adobe Illustrator environment (Win 11); including Web Ai beta (Chrome browser). These are ops issues I can't figure out. They aren't intuitive to me. I hope someone can explain how to work with them..

* I'm not sure how to de-activate a tool in order to perform some other function. For ex., I create a circle, make it red, then want to create a yellow star. My circle turns yellow and my original circle has an active path around it. It doesn't de-activate even if I hit Esc and go to the Selection Tool.

* I don't understand Align Vertical & Align Horizontal. They seem to behave opposite of what I think each should do. I expect Align Vertical to stack random shapes on an artboard (that I've indicated should be handled together - but not grouped in a integrated way as a new shape) to stack up those misc shapes in a straight line vertically (portrait orientation), but that's not what happens. Web Ai beta lines them up horizontally. The inverse is true for Align Horizontal. The selected shapes get organized and laid out vertically. That's counter-intuitive to me. Can someone explain what I'm doing wrong to make that happen?

* What does Repeat do? And, how would I work with it? In one of my tests I duplicated a shape then had to rotate it over & over again. If Repeat would have minimized that effort it would be great. But I didn't know about Repeat. And, now that I see it on the Taskbar, I don't know how to use it.

* What does Divide All do? How do we separate shapes we've combined (I've had no luck trying) back into disaggregated piece parts? I thought the combining functions would work like Powerpoint's Group & Ungroup. But they don't seem to.

* wrt Text - how do we correct a misspelling in a line of text once the text is applied? I tried various approaches with no luck. I hope we don't have to delete & start all over again.... Also, how can we get Text to follow along a Path?

Thx in advance for any usage tips for a complete Ai (& Web Ai beta) newbie!