That can lead to ("Work", "Worry", "Word") so you'd then have to type the 'k'. Now you could have ("Work", "Worker", "Worked") and still are missing the variant you want.
It'd be nice to long press "Work" at step one, get that completed without a space being inserted, then tap 'i' to get ("Working", "Workings", "Workingmen")
Whilst they're doing that how about adding caret-placement sensitivity:
When I click just after the initial letter (pipe representing caret that would be) eg "w|orking" the chances of me wanting to type "worked" are pretty slim; instead it should offer "Dorking" (a UK placename), "borking" and such; according to my frecency scores.
Similarly if I click to place the caret at "work|s" I'm probably after "words" or "worts" (beer stuff), or similar. Again "working|" and I'm probably going to change to a different suffix - works, workers, worked.
I'm amazed that gboard (Google's Android keyboard) doesn't already do that? Perhaps I missed a setting.
It turns out that iOS prediction will make a provisional guess based on what you typed and will go back and adjust its autocorrections as you type subsequent words. You can see this more clearly if you use dictation, but allegedly it won't do as well if you use the word corrections every time.
The way I use autocomplete is that I type the entire word I mean really quickly. I get most (or all) of it wrong, but the autocompleter has enough information to substitute that with the correct word. It's much faster than the read-evaluate-correct loop you're describing.
It'd be nice to long press "Work" at step one, get that completed without a space being inserted, then tap 'i' to get ("Working", "Workings", "Workingmen")