Yes, it's bad, and yet another example of a very public, beloved and well used service by Google being "improved" away by some PM to get that promotion, thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design (lest they challenge the SV-career man's assumptions that 'It's better this way!')
Google is by and far the bigget culprit at this tactic, and it's getting very, very tired. I hope the team responsible for this change reads this: You made one of your best products harder and more inefficient to use.
Having worked on Maps myself (as well as other stuff at Google): you're exactly right. It's make-work. Fixing things that aren't broken, so the PM, UX, and Eng leads can say they did something and get promoted.
To be fair, the same process has been underway on MS Word and Excel for 30 years now. Simple things (like designating the top row of the spreadsheet to be a non-scrolling header) should be simple, and they're not anymore.
It's not complicated, it's right where it should be, it just has a label that somehow manages to be both highly correct in a technical sense and completely unintuitive to anyone who doesn't already know what it's called.
It's not only that, but also the way the ribbon UI resizes when things don't fit on screen all at once. You never know, if there are functionality that's missing from view.
I agree the new design is awful. Admittedly I was used to the old scheme. But to me the new one feels worse. As the article suggests water and parks blend together. Now to much stuff blend together. I also use the topo overlay and it had some sort of weird banding to it that makes it hard to look at. Definitely feels like a step backwards
Maps is not run by a man (except philosophically speaking). Perhaps the contrast was adjusted because of the emergence of P3, XDR, OLED, Liquid Retina, etc. Trust me, Google is very lucky to have her magic. ;)
Google is by and far the bigget culprit at this tactic, and it's getting very, very tired. I hope the team responsible for this change reads this: You made one of your best products harder and more inefficient to use.