No the actual swatches don't work all the time, either. It just kind of......decides when it is going to work or not.

Oh. Recent Colors, you say? Well, Opt/Alt just doesn’t work when these are clicked to assign one to a selected gradient stop, it works only for the actual swatches (for now, I hope). I was sure the request about it exists here at UV, but it turned out it was never surfaced outside the Beta testing. Sorry for taking that long to figure this out. Can you confirm it’s the case, please?

Sorry images did not attach - see here.

I do not have the ability to record video due to company policies.

Again, this has been happening fairly consistently (but occasionally working) on multiple versions of Illustrator and even on a new computer with a new install and no saved preferences transferred over. New documents and old.

Attached are some recent experience with a brand new file.
UI1 - new document with a simple rectangle using a gradient
UI2 - the picker refusing to accept a swatch and changing it to solid fill, opening the color palette
UI3 - the picker deciding it will take a swatch and actually changing the gradient stop.

I have found no correlation to cause the issue.

Indeed, the recent colors sections is missing in the contextual dropdown :( It’s only available in full Color and Swatches panels. It’s a workaround anyway, not the solution.
Now that you say you had it in past, I recall something similar I had... I always thought it was me being clumsy and not selecting a stop properly.

We need to dig more on the circumstances then when it happens — what is selected, what is the layout of the panels, what is currently active in all the UI, does this plague all other objects or only one gets affected... what about other docs, or a new document at all... it’d help to immediately try to record this on video, to try to catch the exact steps. If I ever catch this, I’ll comment — please do the same (and spread it if you know other users affected).

Hi Egor.

Your workaround functions for actual swatches but not anything in places like, say, "recent colors," where it has in the past. So it's half a solution but not an entire one.

This issue has persisted for me across multiple updates of Illustrator, too, as the original poster mentioned. For me, it's even lasted across multiple Windows computers.

Amanda, it’s indeed Opt/Alt — holding it with a stop selected should applied the clicked swatch to this stop... and it works for me.
Will try to abuse it more to get it fail in the same manner.
For now you can use another workaround — double-click the stop, toggle the dropdown panel into the Swatches mode and pick the swatch you need there. Does it work, or does it do the same thing?

I believe I am having the same issue but am not sure if it's a bug or a 'feature.'

I used to be able to select a stop on a gradient, hold down a key (I believe alt but obviously I can't test it now), and select a swatch or recently used color. It would pick up that color on the selected node only. Now, you can see it does this weird thing where it creates a gradient with that selection in my Document Library but changes the actual selected object to a solid fill of the color instead. It's extremely frustrating.

Using the eyedropper tool on the gradient palette gets around this but also adds extra steps that I didn't need before. I'm not sure if this was an intentional change on Illustrator's part, but it's made things more cumbersome for longtime users like me who were able to do this with some keyboard shortcuts and now have to erase decades of muscle memory.

Ollie, please tell more. Ideally, record a small video with you showing the exact steps you try. Ai offers quite a lot of ways to change a color of a gradient stop, so perhaps I try those that work... can’t reproduce it for now.