How does Android do it better? I don’t remember there being any way other than the fiddly little handles, which you can also use on iOS

There's a handle on the cursor, it has a pretty big area where you can grab it. Once you've grabbed it you get a magnified view of where the cursor is as you're dragging. I think it also scales down your dragging motion to make placing the cursor in the right spot less fiddly too, but I haven't got any real evidence of that other than feel.