iOS 11.2 seems to finally have kicked the iOS uploads into running reliably. Had a number of clients with same issue I had - namely Photos just sat with an ever increasing number of photos to upload but never uploaded, and the pause and resume buttons did nothing. Probably saw 5 phones with the exact same symptom. Seems to be working reliably again after the updates.
I downloaded a lot of web pages into Evernote, and I store lots of PDF attachments in there too (think bills, scanned documents, etc.). Notes has been reliable since I rebuilt it from my macOS 10.12 Time Machine cache of my iCloud account (removing the Evernote import folder at the same time). I do occasionally still see shared notes fail to update instantly, and have to wait an indiscriminate length of time for notes to sync to my Mac from iPhone.