So I cancelled Apple Music and reluctantly went back to Spotify. At least in Spotify, music playback is functional.
Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine. Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.
Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it. It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.