I’m having the same problem. It’s extremely inconvenient when doing a huge find and replace job. I was just converting one of my 7,500 word stories from third-person to first-person, so I had to replace all the “he”, “him”, “his”, “himself”, etc. It was hundreds of replacements, and I had to go through the document several times with this prev/next attack to find them all … and I still missed some.
The reason the highlight is important is because I don’t want to replace every instance. For example, if it was in dialogue, “He told me about it,” I wouldn’t want to replace that instance of “He” because it’s not referring to the narrator. I need the highlight in order to see the context of the replacement before I click Replace.