I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.
From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.
In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.
I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.
I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)
Archiving is redundant. You can have manual update and update the app as needed, you can have auto update and update all installed apps, or you can just remove the app from your device and install it again later when you need it. If you don't use an app, just remove it. You can redownload it later. Why keep things you admit you don't use?
E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.
Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.
These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.