Yes, this is a known bug of Minecraft on iPadOS and has been for over 5 months.
It is currently tracked in MCPE-51263.
Translations are poor and inconsistent for almost all languages in Bedrock. This is because private translators are hired to translate Bedrock, while Java is handled by the players themselves using Crowdin. There’s a feedback post to move the Bedrock translation to Crowdin as well: https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/360061727312-Minecraft-Bedrock-should-have-own-Crowdin-translation-project
Could this please be fixed already? It’s been over 4 months since the release of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 and this probably isn’t such a difficult fix. Thanks!
Hello, so the iPadOS 17 Beta is now available. I tested this today with (Developer Beta 1) and unfortunately the problem with the “esc” key persists.
It seems like the fix will indeed need to come from Apple, since Mojang either can't or doesn't want to do anything about this problem.
For what it's worth, I reported this problem to Apple under the feedback number FB12272068.