Highlight text in pages

Confusingly, Apple has used the term Highlight (as it appears on the Insert menu, or your keyboard shortcut) as a misnomer for the industry-accepted text highlight. Instead, Apple's usage is as a markup comment.

When you want a real text background color (e.g. highlight) then you will need to use the Font section's More Text Options button which introduces another panel from which you can select a Text Background as shown below. There is no keyboard shortcut or possibility of one for this arcane means to set this color:

I have previously sent multiple feedbacks to the Pages product team to move this just below the Text Color selector but that request has been ignored.

Rule of thumb: if the question begins with Why? then only Apple can answer I and they are not here.

For feature requests:

Feedback - Pages - Apple