Thanks for the feedback!
This was the motivation behind change! sometimes while bulk selecting someone could misclick the title instead of the checkbox and lose their bulk-selection work.
The initial idea was to remember bulk selected topics so they’d still be there on return… but this lead to full-row selection as a method of avoiding the issue. Other apps also do this, though it may more often be a mobile-specific behavior.
So that’s the why
It isn’t currently… but if we receive more feedback around this change we could do something like that or possibly diverge the behavior based on screen size.