@sgunhouse @burnout426 After trying to follow your advice (partially successful), I think I've discovered the issue and how to fix it.
Running opera from the command line, I noticed the followed warnings output to the console:
(opera:20884): IBUS-WARNING **: 12:34:31.739: Unable to connect to ibus: Could not connect: Connection refused
Furthermore, on every keystroke that got lost (at least after the first few keys), the following was output:
(opera:20884): IBUS-WARNING **: 12:34:48.252: Events queue growing too big, will start to drop.
Researching those more generic errors, ibus is the "Input Bus" and I came across this remarkably similar issue report:
thunderbird: keyboard does not work: Unable to connect to ibus #3379
That issue was described as cropping up on a number of applications, including Firefox (although I do not have this issue there).
The final resolution there after a lot of discussion:
"deleting .config/ibus/bus did the trick and the keyboard now works"
Same circumstances on my system, same happy ending with my Opera too. Thank you.