Well, no worries then. A few thousand people who don't get to hospitals or who end up in dangerous situations is not LOOOOOONG term thinking and can safely be ignored.
It's a wonder a human being ever found a hospital before Google saved the human race from it's own helplessness!
If you don't have a map, you might ask a local for directions or take a cab if you're in a hurry to get somewhere that you don't know the location for. If your map is wrong, you are more likely to actually end up in the wrong place -- and then become that much more confused and make poor decisions while trying to find your way without it.
The proper response to bad search results is not to talk about how you can still manage just fine with paper maps, unless you're implicitly proposing that we give up on the electronic maps completely.
Once there's an alternative, it's a flame-debate, where each side gives itself a pass. Controversy drives page views. Nobody wrote about how bridges mapped to 3D terrain in Google Earth, but we get a Tumbler of iOS 6 3D bridges examples.
A smartphone is not a replacement for common sense. In Apple Maps, you can clearly look at your destination and say "Hmm, wow, that doesn't look like sprawling medical complex, perhaps this tiny out of the way building isn't a hospital".
People have been misled by Google Maps and MapQuest and Tom Tom for years and years. How common are stories of people driving off of cliffs or other such nonsense because a GPS said so?
Yes, Apple Maps isn't perfect, but it's a long shot better than Google Maps and MapQuest were six months into the product, and is actively providing superior maps to the baseline of a decade ago, or even five years ago.
But aside from that there's also the lost-time factor. If Apple Maps misleads me far more often than other products (which it does), then I waste far more time (and gasoline) using it. That is a real problem with it, and one that cannot be answered with "ALL Mapping data is imperfect".
As for Apple Maps being better than the baseline from five years ago, is there a way for that statement to be useful that doesn't require access to a time machine?
We've really only had mobile mapping for about 7-8 years now, it's amazing how quickly people have forgotten how to get places without it.
The question is not what they did BEFORE the smartphone, but what they do now. What they do now is to use the maps application that came with the device they bought.