I love contributing to Google Maps, in my area and around my country. In particular, I often find myself interested to add missing roads and correcting the existing ones, since the network in my country (Italy) is as you know pretty complex.
However, since Map Maker was discontinued, users, and guides too, cannot easily add new roads or editing existing ones. Since drawing is not allowed anymore, we can just select a point, send our feedback and hope some reviewers will eventually draw and edit roads for us. In my country this almost never happens, and I understand that. There are so many requests and reviewers can't handle all of them. They have no time to draw all roads, and they don't know what to actually draw or edit, since our feedback are too generic and sometimes non-verifiable.
This is causing problems in G Maps' road system. Waze, which until last year had just main roads in my area, is now surpassing Maps since its users have much more editing options. They can easily add small roads, from scratch to finish, and wait for RER review after they sent all changes.
In the past months I found a lot of road errors even serious ones but I could almost never solve them. Everything is in review, and nothing is added.
We need road drawing and advanced editing back, at least for Local guides, otherwise we will end up having a lot of places, but without a proper road system in-between.
2022
