Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such.

This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will have a degraded experience in some way

Headsets have been fine IME, but the killer is car bluetooth. Can't swap that out easily.

We use to have a saying for this behavior, embrace and extend something...

I think the difference is intentional vs unintentional.

Apple has the MFI program for these things. You can get certified and tested in relatively short order.

They also aren’t removing the original protocol support or anything like that.

What I will say is that I think they don’t devote as much QA resources to getting it right as they do their own protocols, hence the difference.

With Microsoft it was very different. They wanted to subsume or shutdown whatever they targeted with EEE

What makes you think that's not a software problem too?