This is a chicken and egg issue. Congestion is so bad in many US cities due to a lack of investment by the local, state, and federal governments. It is thankless work, you have to inconvenience people and spend a shit ton of money just for a project that people will take for granted as soon as its done. So it doesn't get done.

Then people have to solve their problem of simply not being able to commute in their own city by finding alternative routes. Which they would do without Google Maps anyway. Maps is just making it easier. So I disagree fundamentally with the generalization that these apps are "making it worse" just because they are making it convenient. The alternative is that people just don't do what they want to do because they don't know how, which isn't "better."

I would rather blame the people not solving the problem (governments and voters) than the people who are (companies and apps) in this instance.

The article you shared also has a false premise. If the main roads are congested, and people diverge from that road and congest other roads, there is still more overall traffic flow. And this isn't Europe, where we have thoughtful city planners in every major city. The city planners aren't fixing the bridge near my house and 4 lights within a short distance, or the static 50-second timed lights on the alternative route any time soon. I'm not breaking their genius plan because their plan wasn't genius in the first place.

Off topic. Changing the timing of the stop lights is not causing cars to reroute to side streets. The article you’re linking does not even mention project green light.

In fact, project greenlight addresses some of the problems this article you linked complains about (the fact google and city leaders were working separately)

Waze is about minimizing drive time for the locally for the individual, but that's at odds with minimizing drive time globally.

This seems to be about optimizing flows globally, and there's a feedback loop between Google maps and intersection timing. For instance, if the majority of traffic flows east/west through an intersection, then you could expect more time is given to that flow than north/south. This would minimize global drive time, but it wouldn't be locally optimum for people that drive north/south through that intersection.