Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)