To add to this, I’ve recently found out you are unable to identify and tag people in Shared Albums as well. Unless I’m missing the feature somewhere, you can’t just search for someone you’ve already identified and have it show you images that others have added to that shared album. Very frustrating since I don’t want to always download all images from a shared album to my own library.

iCloud Photos (including shared albums) really could use some quality of life improvements. My biggest and longest running gripe is that smart albums on Mac don't sync to iOS. I also experience much of what you've listed here, in particular the invites disappearing into the ether, needing to be canceled and resent multiple times.

It’s shocking how poor it along with the photos app is in general compared to others like Google Photos.

Photos in general is terrible at basically everything once you start to use it more extensively, ie more than the average person who just takes pictures of their friends every now and then and scrolls back through the camera roll.

Shared albums suck. Album sorting sucks. iCloud syncing works most of the time, but there’s no obvious way to force a sync, which is useful if you want to upload a big album to your phone from your DSLR for example. It should also be way easier to separate junk pictures from nice ones (ie stuff you save because you need to remember a serial number).

The idea apple has talked about before is having this stuff sorted without you having to do too much or be too involved with it, but in reality their in-built features and UI design doesn’t work and even gets in the way if you try to do things properly.

Photos is one of my key gripes with Apple tbh.

One day I randomly found all my lost Shared Photo invitations on my work iPad. I never really use the camera or photos on that, but that’s the only place they went- it is signed into iCloud with the exact settings as my iPhone and Mac. No matter what I do I only get Photo invitations on the iPad.

Had a similar thing with my partner’s HomeKit invitation- it would ONLY go to her iPad, no matter what.
Oh and just remembered the same issue happened when Find My iPhone wouldn’t work on my dads phone. 8 months later I did a point OS update on his iPad, which then prompted a new Agreements Confirmation, and received received 16 “found iPhone” alerts all at once… either months later lol.
The software agreement thing has been a major issue for a LONG time. Gotta be a better way to catch that and force the popup everywhere.

Not sure if that’s helpful, but check all your signed in iCloud devices and make sure they’re all on the latest OS.

Stupid tip, but if you have older devices you lightly use, which can’t run the latest/current OS, create a unique isolated iCloud account for those devices.
Yes, it can involve extra steps, but it will mitigate all the issues mentioned above.

Maybe learn how to use them, jfc crybaby