Totally agree. In theory, I see a huge potential for vector tiles in not only base maps, but also as a way of easily creating a cache for static features. However, there just seems to be too many quirks/bugs with vector tiles. My biggest gripe is that what you see in Pro does not get translated to the vector tiles. You may produce a great map in Pro, but when you create the vector tiles, I was left disappointed with how it looked in vector tile format. Labeling is a huge problem with current vector tiles, not only do the labels not seem to respect their placement in Pro, but they don't seem to respect label scales. In the original vector tiles I created to start this thread, the labels were all the same font size and did not change sizes at different scales as they did in Pro.
I have virtually given up on vector tiles since I created this post in hopes of Esri addressing these issues. For me personally, until these issues are fixed, they are not worth using on complex maps. For simple caching of features that require no labels, I can see them working, but if your map has any type of labelling, I would be prepared to be disappointed.