Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.
The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.
Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.
So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.
I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.
so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.
I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.
I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...
Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.
I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.