Portal experience for practice is HORRIBLE, what am I missing?

Apologies if this topic has been brought up many times before, but I am so frustrated by the Portal experience and I want to understand if I am missing something entirely.

I want to practice flying helicopters and planes. That's it. I've searched on Portal for servers/experiences and there seem to be plenty of choices of experiences made for this.

I have gone into at least 30+ different maps/servers and it is the exact same experience: No vehicles spawning at all. I've tried servers with people in them, I've tried hosting different experiences (locally too), I've tried what seems to be everything and all I get are empty maps with no vehicles spawning.

The few times I do find a server that is working, I get incredible lag and rubber-banding. I then try hosting that experience for better performance and it just doesn't work.

Am I missing something? Are 99% of the portal maps saying "Helicopter practice" just broken? How hard is it for a simple map + vehicle spawn to work, I've been able to load into complex portal experiences just fine.

I'm so frustrated that the game doesn't have any vehicle practice mode built in. Passing the buck to the players to make a portal experience just seems lazy and apparently very buggy