Kerning options (optical vs metrics) unstable

If I set kerning to Optical in the character settings panel, then click on the image with the text tool, the tool setting either switches over to Metrics or becomes blank. It doesn't matter if I'm using a preset or not, nor does it seem to matter which font I use (though I haven't tried all of them, of course). I have to manually highlight all the text and change the kerning setting back to Optical every time.

This slows down my workflow by a considerable factor; defeats much of the purpose of presets; and, since I have to remember to manually change a relatively subtle visual setting, exposes me to accidentally shipping improperly kerned typography.

This seems like a serious and long standing bug, but from other searches I gather people are just living with it. Related posts:

Adobe Support Community post from 2018. This is marked as solved but the solution is vague and only applies to CS6.

Adobe Support Community post from 2019, asking how to make Optical default. No responses.

Reddit /r/photoshop post from 2018, asking how to type with Optical kerning by default. No one in the thread had a solution, I gather everyone just manually sets it to Optical each time.

I'm using Adobe Photoshop Version: 23.2.1 on Windows 10 64-bit.

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated, it's really driving me crazy. Thank you.