iTunes may have gotten better at one time, but it's grown to be a kludgy mess. And iCloud may be getting better, but it is nowhere good enough.
Just this morning my wife took a photo on her iPhone that she wanted to share, but wanted to do so from the Mac- she finds it easier. But no matter what we did, we couldn't get the photo to sync (though all her older photos had been.) We signed in and out of iCloud, on both devices, restarted both - nothing we did made the photo sync to the iMac. It's completely inexplicable that things that sometimes work just don't work with no way to restart them. Compared to what Google does, iCloud is amateur hour.
It used to be, with home sharing, if I played a tune on one device, or skipped it on a device, that would get instantly synced over to all other devices in that home sharing account with iTunes and the music app on iOS. Since they switched from iTunes Match to iCloud library, suddenly these things get synced once or so a day, not as tunes are played. Since I have a bunch of playlists based on when songs are last played or last skipped (or number of times skipped), iTunes had grown worse, not better, in the last year. iTunes used to be a pretty lean app with a lot of power, but it's grown into a bit of a mess that grows more and more difficult to use and sync with.
iPhones are the best smartphones, in my opinion, but Apple software can be either great or mediocre, and Apple web services are from merely good enough to vastly inferior to competing services.