How do we add copy and paste to the right click menu?

The problem is Illustrator-specific, for some unknown reason. In general, Adobe applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, and the video applications have extensive, long lists of extremely relevant commands in their context menus. But historically, Illustrator context menus have been very weak and lacking obvious commands. For example, if you select a blend, its context menu has no commands that will let you edit that blend. Or if you select a linked image, the context menu has no commands for link management, Image Trace, etc.

What has been happening recently is that many useful context-sensitive functions have been added to the new-ish Properties panel (though not copy/paste), and the Properties panel is probably more discoverable for new users. But power users accustomed to rich context menus in other Adobe applications still aren’t finding those in Illustrator.

A rather insane point in this case is that this has been requested for more than two decades. I cannot explain why it isn't there, but sometimes I think some kind of unexplainable sloppiness or stubbornness are the reasons. I'm pretty sure it would not take more than one or two hours to implement it and make it available in the contextual menu.

Apart from that, it would be even better to be able to add any desired command to the contextual menu (and even save and store that as custom menu sets that could be activated depending on specific needs). But that would be, of course, more complicated to incorporate.