For example, the Home app and HomeKit situation is also unreliable. People's devices suddenly disappear from their Home app on bigger installations. You have to delete the entire thing and start over and go and find all the barcodes again. There's a well known workaround for setting up Home Assistant, moving all your devices to its control and having it export to your HomeKit. People hate doing this but it's been one of the reliable ways of stopping this from happening in larger setups.
Also in the HomeKit area, synchronization of voice recognition for personal requests in a multi-person house is extremely fragile. It works for many people, but sometimes it just doesn't. It is supposed to be transparent and automatic - if you teach your phone to recognize your voice, then all the HomePods in your house are supposed to as well. Except sometimes they just don't sync and you have to reset the homepods to factory defaults and reintroduce them just to get them to sync the voice recognition. Or worse, your phone won't let you turn on voice recognition for you in homekit even though your phone is doing recognition successfully.
Or even more maddening, the home app says you're signed in with a different apple ID on your phone and home app, but it's the exact same ID.
And that's assuming you can even join the home on your phone. My wife's phone is nearly impossible to invite to our "Home". The invites never arrive if using the appleID. Sometimes it'll work if the invite is done by phone number, but again, no invite message. Sometimes firing up the Home app on her phone will announce that there is a pending invite but it often takes 5-10 tries over a few days to get this far.
When searching on the support forums, it is easy to find other people who have had these exact same problems for years.
Or the AirTag situation. I put an airtag on a remote control that keeps getting lost in the room. But only one person in the house can locate it with the UWB direction finding system. I don't want to have to put two or three airtags on the same remote just because Apple won't let us share tags between family members. This is just silly.
Sadly, I find myself agreeing with the article. Apple has drifted from "it just works" to being surprised if it actually works.