Both of your examples are actually very good at explaining my point. Both Instruments and perf largely expose the same information, since they use trace features in the hardware together with kernel support to profile code. Where they differ is the UI they provide. perf provides almost nothing; Instruments provides almost everything. This is because perf is basically a library and Instruments is a tool that you use to find performance problems.

Why do I like Instruments and think it is better? Because the people who designed it optimized it for solving real performance problems. There are a bunch of "templates" that are focused on issues like "why is my thing so slow, what is it doing" to "why am I using too much memory" to "what network traffic is coming out of this app". These are real, specific problems while perf will tell you things like "oh this instruction has a 12% cache miss rate because it got scheduled off the core 2ms ago". Which is something Instruments can also tell you, but the idea is that this is totally the wrong interface that you should be presenting for doing performance work since just presenting people with data is barely useful.

What people do instead with perf is they have like 17 scripts 12 of which were written by Brendan Gregg to load the info into something that can be half useful to them. This is to save you time if you don't know how the Linux kernel works. Part of the reason why flamegraphs and Perfetto are so popular is because everyone is so desperate to pull out the info and get something, anything, that's not the perf UI that they settle for what they can get. Instruments has exceptionally good UI for its tools, clearly designed by people who solve real performance problems. perf is a raw data dump from the kernel with some lipstick on it.

Mind you, I trust the data that perf is dumping because the tool is rock-solid. Instruments is not like that. It's buggy, sometimes undocumented (to be fair, perf is not great either, but at least it is open source), slow, and crashes a lot. This majorly sucks. But even with this I solve a lot more problems clicking around Instruments UI and cursing at it than I do with perf. And while they are slow to fix things they are directionally moving towards cleaning up bugs and allowing data export, so the problems that you brought up (which are very valid) are solved or on their way towards being solved.