It depends on what you're using it for. Maybe it's the best for finding things like restaurants, looking up business hours, reviews, things like that. Basically a spatial view of points of interests. But as a map I find it very lacking, mainly because of their color scheme, but they're also missing data lite small roads, paths, small lakes. White roads on light gray is difficult to see, and overall it's very low contrast. Which is strange, because they have bragged multiple times of using ML to automatically classify areas and coloring them correctly, but it's only used when zoomed out.

Compare these images and see which map style you prefer: https://imgur.com/a/419XB50

Maps on Android for me became painfully slow. Every time I went to use it, I'd stare at a half-drawn screen for ages. I had a few year old flagship Android phone and that sort of experience was just silly. Google has heaped more and more into Maps, trying to make it do everything, and it has become a resource hogging monstrosity. When I open Maps, I want to quickly search for something and then likely navigate to it. Not wait for even the screen to get drawn, then wait for autocomplete, then wait for the map to draw, etc.

There are also some really bizarre choices in how the UI works. I don't remember exactly, but I believe when you search, you get a wildly zoomed out regional view, and then when you click on a specific result...you're still stuck at the very zoomed out view. So in order to see if you clicked on the right result, you have to pull the map waaaaaay in.

I just found myself baffled at how bad the usability was. Did the people running Maps actually watch people using their product?

Yes, Maps is the best I've used. I had Apple maps on the other day. I knew the area and knew I was close to the destination. A left turn and about 100 yards down the road. Apple wanted to take me nearly a mile north and then loop back. It does that kind of stuff all the time.

I haven't compared Google Maps to a dedicated device like a Garmin. I wonder how that would do.

My biggest fear, that’s already half realized, is that enough mapping companies go out of business that a ton of map building knowledge just vanishes and it takes decades to have decent solution rise again when Maps finally goes under.

I fear that in particular for local mapping, as right now outside of OSM the only companies putting serious effort in maps are US and China based (to my knowledge at least)

Maps was solid but I'm so sick of seeing: this alternative route will get you there 2 hours slower.

This is interesting as ~3 years ago, I made the switch to Apple Maps because Google Maps started becoming something like "Google Travel" instead.

As someone who enjoyed smaller screens, the app started getting cluttered with attractions, reviews, and various icons in way of UI and map elements.