Same here, I had the XM3 and the pairing issue was very frustrating. Particularly because I want to use the headphones on multiple devices (two Macs, iPad, iPhone) and pairing between devices took forever. I bought the Airpods Max and couldn't be happier. Pairing with devices almost always just works, most of the time I don't have to do anything. I walk with my phone and listen to a podcast, then I awake my Mac from sleep, hit play in Spotify, and it works. This alone is worth the steep price of the Airpods Max for me.

The only issue I had with them was that I recently tried to connect them to a Mac that wasn't in my iCloud. It is possible to do a non-iCloud paired direct bluetooth connection with them and this worked. But ~1 week later they suddenly disappeared from my main iCloud account. I'll not try that again.