This is my biggest issue with the new OS updates...it makes the feature much less useful as there's no incentive to fix bad results if I have to do it across three devices. They could have stuck to in device processing and allowed synchronisation within Apple Photos apps only, but stripped the metadata from any export.
Aside from some technical reasons not yet solved. There is also the reason of. That's it's done in each individual device, on device. If someone has an iMac, iPad and iPhone. Which device then becomes the "master" device to sync to all other devices you own when they're all doing their own individual scanning?
The issue of what edit wins isn't a big deal, same applies to other file types. If they timestamped edits and whether the edit was made by iOS or the user, you could handle most cases with logic that the most recent user edit wins, and if no user edit has been made either the oldest or newest iOS edit wins. Sure you can create infinite "but what if" scenarios, but generally with these things simple logic that's deterministic works best.
The other thing that simplifies it is there is only one correct answer, a face will reference one person and it should always be the same person. There's more chance for ambriguity when dealing with say a text document where two versions are more likely to wildly diverge. On the chance the names don't match, maybe due to a typo or whatever, the photos apps have the ability to merge two faces anyway.