No Google has definitely gotten progressively worse at navigating. The original satnav system in my 2004 Prius was very good at the time (probably still mostly is) - "quick" takes the presumed speed of a "major" road, and calculates with that. It led to mostly sensible routes following main roads. These were routes I would've picked myself from a map book.

Google Maps these days...just doesn't seem to do that. They've overweighted their traffic management algorithm or something, but it seems to have no notion of the idea that you can't negotiate 50kmh residential roads with a turn every block at anything close to 50kmh, and such a drive is incredibly stressful. And then will do other things like conclude that a side-road against traffic turn into a main road (so right for me, equiv to a left in the US) is something that will easily be done any time of day rather then consist of waiting for a gap in 4 lanes of traffic.