In my experience - AirDrop works as expected about 30% of the time. Enough to make it absolutely by far the worst option for file sharing.

I don’t even consider it an ‘option’ anymore while transferring files. I’ll just upload it to my server, since I know - by default - even on the same wifi network, AirDrop is as useful as picking a number in your head and having a friend guess it.

I can’t honestly think of a regular ‘service’ on iOS and MacOS that is as fundamentally broken as AirDrop. I’m not sure what’s so complicated about writing a device to device file sharing service, but - for instance - I just tried to share a file from my Mac to my iPhone. Didn’t work; don’t see my iPhone. Same wifi network - no firewall; no filters. This is a majority of the time.