I understand your perspective but for you and anyone else reading, here’s a more familiar analysis.
Maps apps don’t make much use of scroll APIs at all, they tend to use pointer events (and/or their older mouse equivalents). When they do it’s almost always auto-panning to some item in a more traditional results list, and always a horrible experience. Apart from infinite scroll, the most common uses of scroll-related APIs are:
- deferring load/execution of resources until they’re pertinent; this is almost always a better UX, unless it’s done very poorly (side eye at many news sites)
- removing offscreen elements from long lists to minimize their performance impact; again almost always a UX benefit unless done poorly, though easier to screw up
- restoring scroll position between interactions; generally neutral, about the same level of quality as built in behavior, but better than not doing it when there’s client-side navigation (and I know this is another JS curmudgeon complaint, but it’s almost everywhere and mostly unnoticed)
- scroll-snap, which has eliminated the need for JS for whole classes of presentation (and probably the first unambiguously good thing MS purposefully introduced to web standards)
- offsetting jump in-page anchor/jump links to place content in view where they’d otherwise be obstructed; significantly benefits UX, unfortunately not (yet?) as widely adopted as I’d prefer
- “scrollytelling”, which can be really annoying but also can be incredibly useful if done well; notably a CSS standard is finally getting real world traction and will make the usage much more user controllable and much less awful for users who don’t control it
- shady tracking stuff which is mostly invisible to the user; entirely awful but categorically a whole separate UX topic
- weird event handlers to control things like video volume; I hate these with a burning passion
Overall, IMO, the value is kind of a wash. But the positives generally amplify positives for a lot of other UX problems and newer standards have made them basically mostly harmless.