I typed black words in Designer and they were Vector. When they say Designer is a Vector based equivalent of Illustrator or Inkscape, it seems odd that it doesn't have the basic functionality of being able to trace even a black design into a vector. Vector tracing traces shape fill as well. 'manually dragging around the vector pen along lines' is not the same as Vector Tracing.
So converting from Raster into Vector is a basic function of all other vector based programs.
There's no AUTO trace in Affinity Designer (v1 or v2), but you can manually trace ! Logo by Nick (or something like this) has a pretty good tutorial about this on YouTube! Just to make things clear for people coming here to read this thread.