20 years ago I think the coverage area of Google Maps was still strictly limited to the US + UK. Like, the rest of the world map was empty.

But I worked on Google's geocoding (mapping names to locations) and reverse geocoding (mapping locations to names) systems 15 years ago, and encoding every local ruleset was absolutely not how it worked. Or even encoding any of them.

And what's described in the post are exactly the kinds of problems you'd have back then as well.

Some of these were upstream data quality issues, some were due to deep infrastructure problems that could not have been addressed without a complete rewrite, and others just basic recall/precision tradeoffs around the value of returning a result that doesn't match the query exactly.