> Just show the name of every street damnit.

But why? Google Maps is not a navigation aid. Its purpose is not to help you know the name of the street you are in. It's a tool for paying customers to steer you towards their shops. If all you need to do is follow a path towards a certain shop, they don't need to show you the names of the streets.

Google doesn't really optimize to show you ads. They're a monopoly and the voting shares are owned by Larry/Sergey; they have no intrinsic motivation to care about anything. If you want to be optimization-brained (don't, it's bad for you) they optimize for metrics that individual people make up and use to get promoted.

They monetize the map other ways, like with the expensive API fees, but I wonder if they really care about it. Whenever I look at it for a few seconds I see something obviously sloppy, like misspelled POI names or people adding fake businesses at their apartment.

Google Maps is a navigation aid that's also used to sell ads.

People don't open the app to look at the ads. They open it to navigate, and if it can't be used for that purpose they won't open it at all. It is infuriating to me when a Wendy's ad is given more visual importance in color and size on the app than the actual place I want to find. But it doesn't seem to bother a lot of other people. Somewhere further in the direction of more advertisements is a point where a significant number of normal people will stop using Maps as a navigation tool, and somewhere further still is a point where more advertisements will become less profitable and will be rejected by even the developers. But we're nowhere near that point yet.

Until then, I'll keep using a combination of Garmin Explore, OsmAnd, and Maps depending on how much I care about topo data, traffic status, reviews, search results, and ads. I'm setting up an Owntracks so I can replace the Timeline data that they're removing customer access to, and contributing to OpenStreetMap, but still using Maps.