In what game does Azir thrive?

I've been trying to damnest to grasp this champion, to find his power spikes and get to them, but he doesn't seem to have any. The nature of his abilities is straight forward, but there is a marked delay or lack of response with his abilities that I can't put my finger on, and in many don't target their intended goal. His Q where he has his soldiers charge is especially bad given how random their formation is. Should they not converge on the point where you targeted your Q? Instead they more often than not stay spread out and over shoot or fall short of the area where you intended to move them, and you're clearly within range.

His scaling is really messed up for an auto attacking champion (ok ordering soldiers to attack on your behalf....) and his only real reliable CC is his ult which surprisingly compared to the rest of his kit, is easy to set up, target, and intentionally place cause it goes where you intend it to! His Dash shield is super brief and weak and he lost the brief knock up/stun it used to provide effectively encouraging bad positioning on the minion based squishy mage.

The stand soldiers are also unresponsive when you wish to auto attack with them, either sometimes due to range (which is fair), or sometimes they simply don't react in time despite having Nashor's Tooth and having decent attack speed yourself. On a champion that needs multiple auto attacks to deal his damage, there's just currently no reliable way to deliver it. He also can't W towers anymore, which removed his split pushing threat and ability to threaten to end games sooner and pressure the enemy.

TL;DR Now I know that he's meant to be a harasser and zoner, but he doesn't really do it well and his dash is antithetical to that design, which you can argue is for escaping (then why does it have a shield?). His abilities are buggy to say the least with the delay, and his damage is low and doesn't scale well for the type of game League is now, which is typically over by 20min realistically.