I did a test to separate the drop shadow from its object,
it was a page curl in illustrator, in order to select just the drop shadow, I had to Expand Appearance then Ungroup and select. Too long of a process, if was working on a graphics with lots of drop shadows, it wouldn't be as easy.
I can see the developers thinking one might move the object without its shadow, therefore it has to be attached. I agree with Sofia Long point when working on a detailed illustration it would be time consuming, Object Selection by Path works on text only drop shadow is still attached.
I think there should be a tab in the Appearance Panel to detach both, or even better right click would be ideal just like as Unlock.

has a temp work around is to switch to outline mode select than switch back. hot keys are Ctrl+Y or Cmd+Y

This feature is impossible to work with. We need to either go back to how it was altogether, or we need to the option to toggle it off. Object selection by path is not good enough. It limits the clickable area of an object to a tiny thread. You can't use clipping masks properly because of it. When working on multiple artboards and detailed illustrations you still can't click what you need. PRIORITISE THIS PLEASE

>> Observation: area selection somehow avoids selecting edges of drop shadows.

What in the world made you decide to allow an item to be selected by clicking its outer glow or drop shadow, and then make the only way to turn this off to also turn off the ability to select items by their fill? This is truly rendering the program unusable to me in some cases right now. Please change this so that things cant be selected by their shadow or outer glow effect, this is a terrible feature.

The ones who commented that it works - try to do some big projects with this "option" and guess again 🤦🏻‍♀️

Dror, it works indeed. But it also prevents selecting an object by clicking its fill :)

This works 100% - Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.

Who at Adobe made this kind of decision to select an object by its shadow/glow? Do you have any developers/design leads there who really use your products? When artists use shadows/glows, they can be really far away from the object plus the blur around can be shallow... So now the situation is that the user never knows what is selected. So utterly mindless development decision. I just do not understand whats the reason behind this decision.

Neeraj Nandkeolyar Has found the solution guys.... It's not massively ideal that we can only select edges but it's helped a lot.
"Neeraj Nandkeolyar (Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator) commented · There is a setting in that may help in case of large glow/shadows. Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.

Enabling this option will disable clicks on appearances (fill/strokes/effects) from selecting the object. Only paths can be used for selection."

please fix this! Horrible to work with

This is unforgivable. I've been reading so many complaints. It took me half an hour to figure out what was "broken" in Illustrator preventing me from selecting objects. I too have some huge drop shadows blocking EVERY **** OBJECT BELOW ONE LAYER! EVERYTHING! I can't select ONE **** THING below a few small objects because of a drop shadow.

This is insane. Does anyone at Adobe actually try and use their own programs??? How could this be going on for an ENTIRE YEAR with no one actually acknowledging it or fixing it????

FIX THIS **** THING ALREADY!!!! I am paying a fracking fortune. It's stuff like this that makes many people look at much cheaper, equally feature rich alternatives like Krita or Affinity.

There is literally no point to making the shadow cast by an object selectable. It's terribly annoying and increases the time and effort to edit compositions by forcing workarounds like locking and unlocking objects.

please give us the option to change this behavior

DEAR ADOBE. HAVE YOU BEEN RECEIVING MY PAYMENTS AND FEEDBACK FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? GOOD. FIX THE ******* PROBLEM THEN. THANK YOU.

This type of problem exists from the moment Adobe brought shadows etc into illustrator... why it works this way? Who knows...probably it was easier to implement and team is to lazy to fix it.

Please dont write that it is complex...in PS it works fine, its not hard to seperate effects (even fills and strokes) from path INNER area.

Solution by selecting by path only is a joke. Who am I? Surgeon?

From comments below i can see that there was a version when it was working properly. Can anyone provide me info which version it was? Thanks in advance :)

Please allow us to toggle the feature off!

PLEASE, for the love of all that is good, remove this evil or at least give us an option to toggle this feature on or off. It's literally giving me a migraine working on multiple objects with large shadows, forcing me to separate them on multiple layers and locking the ones I don't want to select.

Why, why, why would anyone who has used illustrator ever suggest such an addition? It makes me wonder what the Adobe team is thinking when they rolled this out. Ridiculous. Fixes nothing, adds 10x the frustration.

I'm also having this kind of "feature" in Illustrator CC 2020 (24.0.1) on Windows 10.
I don't know but recently I'm having a headache over Illustrator "features" that doesn't let me do the simple basic task such as selecting objects.
I'm hoping that in the future release they remove these "features".

still no hope I suppose. this is getting annoying...
okay, looks like I'm downgrading version...