I pay for Google Music, and doing so gets you access to the Youtube Premium + the youtube app /w no ads. But despite the two applications being related, the UI teams don't appear to be on the same page, which has resulted in the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' button to be in opposite placement depending on which app you're using. It's infuriating if you've already basically built in muscle memory from Google Music.
I'm not sure why you think such a company needs to exist. Almost all apps run fine on my Samsung Galaxy S5, except for anything made by Google or Samsung. With Samsung I think their software engineering is incompetent, but I think with Google there's probably a lot of pressure to "just make it work" that the engineers mostly test on the latest and greatest Android. Plus I'm sure there's an unspoken rule not to allow older phones to be too useful for too long.
OSM fortunately doesnt have this problem, nor does Mapscii.
For your phone try OSMand if you haven't already, you can find it on FDroid
This isn't how Apple works. They make money from hardware sales - so there is a native app version of Apple Maps for both iOS and macOS. (And, with the recent updates, it is pretty damn great.)
Google Maps on Android is almost entirely unusable now. It's so god damn slow on my Sony Z5c running Lineage. The combination of Maps and Google Services updates has thrown any type of efficiency out the window.
New releases should use less memory and be faster, especially if they do the exact same god damn thing! Google doesn't care, because they expect users to migrate to newer phones every two years. I don't want to generate more e-waste, have repaired several things on my phone several times and don't want to just consume consume consume.
It'd be nice if there was some company to take up that space and create more tools that run on older devices, but unfortunately there'd be no real way to make money at it; no one is demanding it em mass.