I’d consider it similar to always using a GPS/Google Maps/Apple Maps to get somewhere without thinking about it first.

It’s really convenient. It also similarly rots the parts of the brain required for spatial reasoning and memory for a geographic area. It can also lead to brain rot with decision making.

Usually it’s good enough. Sometimes it leads to really ridiculous outcomes (especially if you never double check actual addresses and just put in a business name or whatever). In many edge cases depending on the use case, it leads to being stuck, because the maps data is wrong, or doesn’t have updated locations, or can’t consider weather conditions, etc. especially if we’re talking in the mountains or outside of major cities.

Doing it blindly has led to numerous people dying by stupidly getting themselves into more and more dumb situations.

People still got stuck using paper maps. Sometimes they even died. It was much rarer and people were more aware they were lost, instead of persisting thinking they weren’t. So different failure modes.

Paper maps were very inconvenient, so dealt with it using more human interaction and adding more buffer time. Which had it’s own costs.

In areas where there are active bad actors (Eastern Europe now a days, many other areas in that region sometimes) it leads to actively pathological outcomes.

It is now rare for anyone outside of conflict zones to use paper maps except for specific commercial and gov’t uses, and even then they often use digitized ‘paper’ maps.