"The globe itself is just a black ball that hides anything behind it. On top of that we draw the grid (lat/lng) by looping through coordinates and connecting dots on the surface (same math youd do for platpoints on a map, just wrapped around the sphere). The coastlines and borders come from free geo data files and just drawn on the sphere, anchored.
The atmosphere and a majority of the affects are just tiny shaders (maybe 10 lines of code each) which gives it a strong 3d affect.
Everything else, data points, flights, events, is just coordinates associated with database entries and drawn ui components.
So if you tried it before and went down the rabbit hole of 3D and triangulation, you were probably overthinking it the same way I did at first. The wireframe aesthetic actually works in your favour because you never have to fill anything in"