I noticed that in krita-5.2.0-prealpha-c42eb382fa-x86_64.appimage (built on 2022-12-14), dropping an image as a new layer does not make it active anymore. This function was normal a week or so ago.
That should be fixed in https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita/-/merge_requests/1672
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 462879 ***
Thanks, Halla!