ok… I think I know what causes this… I had 7 dropdowns and one day they all defaulted to the first dropdown value “All” instead of their own placeholder text - which had always worked as expected. The placeholder text was different for each dropdown but that stopped working. To my knowledge I didn’t make any changes that should cause this behaviour. Strange. Then like you in Velo code I tried to manipulate the dropdown placeholder text but no matter what I did - it would not display. Setting placeholder text and selectedIndex - wouldn’t change the placeholder. It would always show the first value in each dropdown. I ended up manipulating the dropdown values to include the placeholder text as the first Value !!! which kind of worked but caused other issues. Then I stumbled across the cause. In the Editor if you look at Settings for a dropdown… the “Type” attribute had changed from “Browser” to “Custom”. When the dropdown type is set to Custom - the placeholder text doesn’t display or cannot be manipulated in Velo code. Somehow all of my dropdowns had switched to “Custom”. I have no idea how/why and I didn’t do it. Some default Editor settings must have changed by Wix and affected exiting sites’ dropdowns (!! 
). If you change the dropdown Type back to Browser the placeholder text should work as normal without forcing blank entries etc in your values list. You can test it really simply by changing that Settings attribute in the Editor and taking a look at the behaviour in your dropdowns. My example here under “View Stock” which now works. I undid the workarounds and change the Type attribute for each dropdown. Hey presto!