> most alternatives, until recently, were not great

Curious to know, what viable alternatives did you discover?

Gmaps WV while using VPN. Download from Fdroid.

Its miles ahead of something like Osmand , which i really, really, tried to like for a year, but its a UX disaster (i could never ever figure it out)

Is that a webview loading Gmaps? That's not what I expected to call "degoogling", haha.

The OSMand UX is clearly not made for casual use, but Comaps is basically the main user-friendly application. It is missing a couple of commonly-used features though, most notably traffic information, which of course Google bases on data collected from its users.

Kagi Maps isn't bad, it's slow but POIs are there with enough data.