I have heard that Bronze is actually pretty difficult to create, since it require a lot of Tin in addition to Copper, and since Tin is fairly rare that control on supply of Tin could be a life or death issue for Bronze age states. I've even heard that the extensive use of Iron in the first place was because of the major disruptions in the Tin trade around the time of the Bronze age collapse, being more of a last resort since Bronze was nearly impossible to manufacture in large amounts.
And yet Iron quickly seemed to establish itself as by far the most useful metal, being more robust and much more common than Bronze, some areas of the world never even really had a Bronze age, going straight to iron, notably Sub-Saharan Africa.
So, why was there a Bronze age to begin with? Why didn't people learn to work Iron earlier? It seems like it has less issues than Bronze, especially in terms of availability.
This is a hard question to give an adequately deep "ask Historians" answer to for two reasons. One, history is the study of written documents, and a lot of what we know about these technologies doesn't come from writing, either because cultures were pre-literate or because we just have a paucity of written evidence at the time. Not to shut down discussion, but one of the archeology subreddits might have interesting information to add on the topic! The second reason is that the answer is pretty simple - you have to heat iron to 1500 C in order to melt it, compared to 1000 C for copper and 230 C for tin. This creates a huge technological hurdle for using iron vs copper for smelting. You can achieve temperatures needed for bronze in pottery kilns. Additionally, the processes you need to get them into a workable shape are also different - most bronze implements were cast: you melted the metal down, and dropped it into a mold, let it cool, then work it a little bit more to get the desired shape. With iron, you have to keep re-heating, shaping, cooling, re-heating, shaping, cooling, which makes the entire process much more time and labour intensive.
There are also additional difficulties: Iron ore has huge amounts of impurities, so you have to find techniques for separating those out to get relatively pure iron - part of this has to do with the fact that Iron in the earth's crust is almost exclusively in the form of iron oxides.
To flush this out a little bit more: people did recognize the benefits of iron well before they had the technology to smelt it. Meteoric iron, which is relatively pure iron and not in the form of iron oxide can be hammered into shapes rather than having to be smelted and hot-forged; the earliest iron implements we see were of hammered meteoric iron.