In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. It's just that the vast majority of products out there are horrible, so when consumers get products like Apple makes they seem heavenly by comparison. And they are, but does that mean they are the best they can be?

Probably also has a bit to do with Apple actually making efforts to improve, whereas others seem to make efforts only to copy Apple. Which doesn't help the situation. For consumers, the ideal, in my opinion, is competition on innovation, not really competition on who can be more "Apple-like".

It’s not awful at all. I installed it yesterday on my iPhone X and I’ve had no problems. I also have the exact same alarm setup and my alarm worked fine. It’s unrealistic to expect there to be literally zero bugs for zero people, and of course the people who do experience bugs will post about it online, but that doesn’t really give a statistically meaningful impression of how reliable iOS 14 is.