Thanks for the help Less.
Homepods are totally upgraded. It appears most of the garbage performance is surrounding the Music app. A lot of the functionality of Siri has restored somewhat (asking for weather, mathematic equations etc) but Apple Music’s functionality has SEVERELY diminished in the past few weeks.
Firstly, homepod’s ability to play any music is totally broken. Either a command of ‘play X album’ will respond with ‘sorry I can’t find X in your Apple Music library’ (yes it is there), or it just waits 10 seconds and says ‘something went wrong with apple music’ and gives up.
But also, even just interacting with my HomePod via the music app is trash now… skipping forward and back a song is so laggy that it I press ‘skip’ twice too quickly it only skips one time, but THINKS it’s on the song it should have been after 2 skips…. And skipping back fails as well, as it gets confused and lags even more.
Similarly, selecting ‘repeat’ or ‘shuffle’ icons is so laggy that I’ll press one and leave the app and it’ll totally forget I’ve selected it and revert to the other setting. Or INCREDIBLY frustratingly, turning OFF shuffle when I start playing an album will revert BACK to shuffle once the first song is completed and going back and turning off ‘shuffle’ gets reverted ENDLESSLY.
This also happens with my apple airpods and AirPods Max via either my iPhone or MacBook.
Airpods Siri command is almost as bad. It also decides it wants to randomly stop my music for no reason sometimes. Dunno if that’s the same issue.
seriously, what the **** is going on? Its worth mentioning my MacBook with a totally separate Apple ID. The only commonality is they share the same Apple Music subscription via family sharing.
so I’m guessing it’s either my Apple Music, or an Airplay issue.
Is there a chance cancelling and re-subscribing to Apple Music may help with this? Will I lose all my music playlists etc if I do this?
, then Home Settings 
> Software Update.