It’s very on brand for Apple to remove an option to trigger / customise something that should “just work”.
Example: iCloud Photos syncing is complete crap on macOS. If it has synced recently it’s not going to do it again. So you sit there like an idiot waiting 10 minutes for a photo you just took on your phone e to show up. When a pull to refresh or refresh button would have fixed it.
iCloud Photos syncing is crap on iOS too. iOS will randomly stop uploading photos to the cloud "to optimize performance". Every time something's not uploading, I check my iPhone settings only to find that it's "optimizing performance" again. Even if it's on a full battery and I'm barely even using it. There is no way to turn this off - you have to manually catch it every single time it decides to "optimize performance" and tell it to sync for an hour. If you took enough photos for it to take longer than that hour to upload them all, you'll have to do this multiple times as it goes right back to "optimizing performance" after that hour. Again, there is no way to turn this off.
Example: iCloud Photos syncing is complete crap on macOS. If it has synced recently it’s not going to do it again. So you sit there like an idiot waiting 10 minutes for a photo you just took on your phone e to show up. When a pull to refresh or refresh button would have fixed it.