My favorite is random pics of someone's kitchen because they live nearby.

So its effectively removed unless you are in Google's spyware ecosystem.

And let’s be realistic: if they’re not signed in - or if they even don’t have a Google account (because they live on the moon), then they’re just gonna follow the instructions and do what they’re told.

Everyone else*

What’s odd is that for a very small portion of the users, this is incentive to actually logout! Less clutter? Yes please.

Unfortunately so.

As much as I don't want to use any Google services, Maps is unfortunately not easily replaced, because it all comes down to user-submitted content.

If you want to look up a restaurant and see photos of the venue and the food, Maps is where that content is.

Google absolutely know how valuable this is and how much leverage they can get with it by the manner they've implemented the change.

I use FOSS wherever I can, but we don't get to choose where other members of the public put their content. Most of the time I can choose to opt out. I consciously don't have Facebook or Insta for example, which leaves me at a disadvantage at times because an increasing number of businesses think it's fine for their only web presence to be a Facebook page - with no actual website of their own.

And it's in those times especially I find myself being pushed to Google maps just to find a user-submitted picture of the menu so I can even see what they've got.

I agree that CoMaps and similar apps don't have the feature set that signed-out Google Maps users are losing in this move by Google, so it's not totally relevant.

I don't agree with just calling CoMaps a navigation app in the sense of "how do I get to Point B", though. In well-mapped areas it has business information including specifics about the shop/restaurant, opening hours, accessibility, payment methods, etc. It has points of interest that give information about a location's history and culture, as well as ancillary information from Wikipedia/WikiData. It has information about green spaces, vehicles and bicycle parking, waterways, sports clubs and tracks/pistes, toilets and other public services, benches, water points, and a bunch more.

It depends

Comaps works pretty well for me. I still use Google maps from time to time but compass works fine the majority of the time.

How come?