iPhone playlists disappeared after sync

This on an iPhone XR running 14.6.

I subscribe to Apple Music and have "Sync Library" turned on.

This has worked fine until yesterday when all my Playlists disappeared from the Music Library on the XR. Everything else is still there. But, when I click on Playlists I just get a message "LOADING LIBRARY". At the top of the Library screen it says "Syncing Your Library..." I left it overnight and this morning, it's still syncing. The playlists are all still there on my iPad and my iMac; they're just MIA on the iPhone.

The iPhone has 14GB of free storage. Music is limited to 4GB.

I tried force quitting the Music app and then force rebooting the iPhone, but that didn't work.

I tried signing out of and back in to "Media & Purchases" (Apple ID), but that didn't work.

I tried signing out of iCloud, rebooting the iPhone and signing back in to iCloud, but that didn't work.

(Aside: Sigining out of iCloud and back in is a huge hassle. The six digit code that is supposed to arrive to enable you to log back in never arrived. I kept asking for it. Finally, Apple gave up and let me sign in to iCloud without the six digit code. How secure is that? Plus, having to set up credit cards in the Wallet, reconfigure iMessages, etc. is a huge PITA. Now I can't enable Apple Pay on my Apple Watch because the iPhone says it can't connect to the Watch which is on my wrist less than 30cm away from my iPhone with Bluetooth on and both connected to the same WiFi SSID. What gives?)

Here's an odd thing. On the iPhone in Music if I select "Home Sharing" my Music Library is displayed. If I select it and wait for it to load (about a minute) then all my playlists are there.

I tried creating a new playlist on the iPhone. That worked. And, that fake playlist has now synced with my other devices. But, my real playlists still won't sync with my iPhone.

Any ideas?



Syncing Forever



Fake playlist works



Playlists are all there in Home Sharing.



Still syncing hours later.



Here's the fake playlist all synced up with my iMac.

I spent over two hours on the telephone with two different Apple support people. Neither had any really good ideas as to what was going on. While looking at my Music Library I discovered that not only did Playlists not sync, but seemingly random albums started disappearing from my Library. There should be eight Beach Boys albums (yes, I'm that old), but suddenly there were only two. The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" album curiously had songs by Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and other artists from the same era.

Toward the end of the conversation the Apple rep went to do some research while I worked on refining a couple of shell scripts. While working I noticed my phone had woken up and was quickly syncing the Music Playlists. What a shock. Rather quickly, all the Playlists appeared and were properly populated with songs. I left it at that with the support tech. I have no idea if something we did triggered the sync, or if some sort of iCloud apocalypse had suddenly resolved itself.

Later on I went to a hardware store. While checking out I wanted to retrieve my store membership number from the Notes app on my iPhone. Oops. The Notes app had no notes at all. Wow.

A couple of hours later the Notes app started syncing and now seems to have all the notes that should be there.

Something definitely going on with iCloud syncing. And, it's not very good.