Hey, I just spent an hour to understand why I had this interface. It seems to be a new feature, so if you click on the text to swap, figma is letting you write the variable name. If you want the “classique’ selection menu, you have to click on the square that preview the color.
The team just pushed a fix, so please give your tab a quick refresh and the search popover should no longer pop up when a variable is already bound (until that behaviour is re-enabled/debugged). Thank you again for flagging it!