That was actually one of my big complaints as well. I don’t think they ever fixed it. My complaint was that you needed to be facing a container to loot it, but Geralt’s regular movement controls felt like steering a sailboat. Even the alternative controls were only a stopgap.

I eventually installed a mod that auto-looted every container within a certain radius. It basically did an invisible ping every second or so, and grabbed the contents for any containers that were close enough. I also had to disable the theft mechanic, because people would get mad when a protected container was auto-looted. But it worked well enough. As a bonus, I didn’t need to get off of Roach to loot herbs/enemies/containers/etc because the radius loot worked even when I was mounted.