iPhone-Mac WiFi sync: total failure

I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and an M1 Max MacBook Pro with Monterey. It's a clean install.

WiFi sync between the phone and the Mac is a complete disaster, the worst bug ridden mess I have ever seen from Apple. Here is what it does for me:

1. I turned on WiFi syncing thinking it would be cool to not have to connect the phone to the Mac to do a full backup (which is backup my preference - I don't like the extremely limited and limiting iCloud backup). That's when this unmitigated disaster started...
2. The WiFi sync never finishes. And when I say never, I mean it. In 3 months since I have had this Mac, the phone never once synced with the Mac over WiFi even though both of them are sitting on my desk less than a foot apart, all day. All I see in Finder is a never ending "progress" bar. It has a full time job: show the "progress" that never happens. Bad enough, but... it gets worse.
3. Due to this idiocy, I can't restart my Mac anymore. When I need to turn it off or it Finder interrupts the restart/shutdown because it is "in the middle of a task" and I am told to "wait for that task to finish" (which is NEVER) "and try again". So the only way to turn off or restart my Mac is to hold the power button until it's dead. I don't think that's healthy. But wait... it gets even worse!
4. It is impossible to turn off WiFi sync. Every time I uncheck the "Show this iPhone when on WiFi" it turns itself back on again. Every. Single. Time. So there is no way to turn it off. I even tried to restart my computer with the phone WiFi off, connected the iPhone via cable, when it showed up in Finder, I turned off the option. Disconnected phone, turned WiFi back on... and there it is again... the **** "Show this iPhone when on WiFi" box is checked again.

Apparently Apple built a digital version of Groundhog Day into the feature - can't kill it, and no matter what you do to kill it, it's back to the same sh@t again. I have never been this frustrated about anything with the Apple logo on it. This is supposedly their latest and greatest. What happened with testing and quality control...?

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution?