Where I live it still works fine. It might not be perfect and it does not work great for longer bike tours (If you actually want nice tours and not just the shortest), but if you're going by car or train it's good.

I don't hike, but my experience with regular walking directions is that Google is regularly wrong…because it overestimates how long a trip will take.

Its directions for driving and public transport (at least where it has cooperation of the local public transport agency, as it does where I live) are excellent.

Cycling directions are the only one where I'd say a normal person's experience is likely to be a bad one, with it regularly taking you on dangerous busy roads rather than nearby quieter streets or bike paths.

So I don't find it particularly surprising at all that someone who isn't a regular hiker would make the mistake of relying on it.

Yeah their maps are pretty shit, often missing paths. I use comaps which is offline open street maps, generally better but can still be lacking. Ordnance survey maps are the best and it isn't even close.

how many reviews an establishment deleted,

This is something you can do?

I hike a lot and use Organic Maps, which is a front end for OpenStreetMaps. Far more detail available on OSM, plus you actually get to choose what's on display, rather than Google arbitrarily deciding that a road/track/landmark aren't important enough to mention.

Perfect example of Google maps issue, is that we did Grampians on the weekend here in Australia. And, it still had a road/track which had been completely deleted (probably long ago). And it wasn't on any other maps.. There was a rusted sign that had been long removed and sawed off sitting where the route clearly used to be, but no sign of route anymore

These days, most people tend to just use AllTrails or Avenza because they're convenient. For Thru hiking (really long hikes), people tend to use products (apparently) like Captopo which better facilitate planning, tagging on long hikes and time calculations (I am hoping to do a thru hike soon).

In practice though, stolen untested routes used in Alltrails present their own problems though, as, the Alltrails team don't actually check if the routes are safe or correct. I suspect they just steal them from other sources. But, for most people, its great as its convenient

OpenTopo/Openstreetmaps are commonly used as the source for a lot of mapping systems though, as it tends to be up to date and accurate in most places. (i use it on my garmin etrex 32x as a backup). I was also advised to use Strava Heatmaps on a hike I am planning to do to find water in certain locations, however, I use GPX Map viewer Pro, and use people I trust for routes if possible (or make my own).

Google Maps is great for roads, but, the data simply isn't that accurate for anything else. And, there is no good way to report bad hiking routes. With OSM and other things, they can be fairly easily fixed

A paper USGS topological map.

FTFA

Instead of Google Maps, Lions Bay SAR provided a list of free and paid hiking apps it recommends, including AllTrails, Granite, and Gaia GPS—which can be used as part of the process of properly researching and preparing for a hike or a trip into the backcountry

I'm surprised no one has said AllTrails since it's one of the biggest. Is there something bad about that app I'm unaware of?

I believe that's very regional, if there's a local hiking club you could try to reach out to them.

There's often forums dedicated to hiking, which have all sorts of hikes mapped out.

But a map service like mapy.com (formerly .cz), has the official marked routes as part of their mapping data

Once I met a group on a 50km trail where a significant other inserted themselves in a "friends trip" but had never hiked more than a few km and had definitely never done multi day backpacking

... It went about as well as you'd think.

We got part of the story from the couple as we checked on them, and the full story when we caught up with the rest of the group a few hours later.

The group said they'd tried to talk the noob out of it multiple times and invited them on multiple short shakedowns but no...

Openstreetmaps with comaps is what I use when I go backpacking, at times having more up to date and accurate information than physical maps. It also does a pretty great job with its time estimations, sometimes it feels the elevation (gain and loss) is off though