Really sad to see. The last thing I want when I'm trying to figure out how to get somewhere is a bunch of sponsored pins and results, slowing me down and giving my brain more garbage to process.

That screenshot in the link is still vastly better than Google Maps: a generic search for "restaurants" may feature a clearly marked sponsored restaurant. There's a long ways to go until they get to Google or Yelp's level. But we all know they'll get there soon enough, copying Google's "innovations" as they go.

Yup, Google Maps is technically superior even as Apple Maps has done tremendous catch-up through the years. But that didn't matter when Apple was good enough and didn't put ads in your face like Google.

for restaurants, i scraped my city's health inspection dataset and mapped it https://github.com/jareklupinski/dash-nyc

the only thing im missing now are actual speakeasy's and popups

Are you going to use OSMAND? Its navigation functionality needs a lot of work.