But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.
Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases.
... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone).
If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.
That's Apple's style and it probably works better for an application like this (there are a lot of problems for which dictatorship is the solution in the technical space... I wish we had a streaming service dictator to solve the Chromecast problem from the other direction).
Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).