They get paid for clicks, drama, and affiliate links. It’s hard to trust anything those people say, save for a handful of people who responsibly test products and are cautious to present their opinions as factual statements. How I use a camera is different than the next person and the next person. It’s valuable to isolate criteria that is important to you and drown out the rest of the noise.
Admittedly, I haven’t used WiFi on my original R5 in a very long time. So I don’t have a good point of reference to compare it to. But I use WiFi on my R6II and R3 bodies all the time. I used it on the R5II to share this image to the media tower so they could get something out ASAP. It works well and if you’re simply transferring over full resolution JPEGS, the process is rather snappy. I have an iPhone and the new app is certainly more reliable to connect to the cameras, but I still on occasion find myself closing the app and reopening it to make it work - sometimes several times. That can be frustrating. The other options would be to just keep it connected to the app and drain the battery even quicker. (I’m getting what feels like very poor battery life on my R5II)
For me, WiFi is just a “nice to have” feature that I wish was better, but thankful to have it all. Back when I was using the 1DXII, the WiFi module was so expensive that I began to shoot JPEGS to another car and had a $80 WiFi card reader thing that I could connect to and browse the files and transfer to my phone to send images back to the media tower. Really clunky. The original R5 was a big upgrade over that workflow, even with the old, less reliable app and connectivity. (I’ve only shot tethered with LAN when I briefly shot for Ford’s NASCAR program and that was a mess in itself. We had a dedicated IT guy that would run the lines and set up the connections before each race. Not to mention you always have a cable sticking out of the side of your camera.)
DJI and Insta360 certainly have figured out how to make connections work reliably. I don’t know if it’s Canon’s app, or the WiFi module itself, but I will still have an occasional issue connecting to it. It’s still SIGNIFICANTLY better than connecting to my Fujifilm app or the Sony app (with older bodies).
