The first would seem valid, if Mission St is, as I gather, rather important. FWIW: after searching for Mission District, the street is now visible far more often. It's labeled even at a zoom level where the water on the east and west are comfortably within the frame.

The decision of de-emphasising street names for the benefit of landmarks/museums/event locations etc. is rather subjective: I often use Maps for purposes other than directions, such as getting a feel for an apartment's neighbourhood, finding restaurants, exploring places in the news, or that appeared in books or movies, or even just "sightseeing".

For all these purposes, the style of Google and Apple Maps is obviously far better than traditional folding maps.

You seem to do direction planning the "old-school" way of manually planning a path from A to B. But that mode has been somewhat deprecated, because typing an address and getting a specific route happens to be far better for this purpose. It's not so much decreasing skills in map reading the luddites so often bemoan: In unfamiliar locations, Google has so much more information, such as both typical and real-time traffic, specific expected times to negotiate every intersection, up-to-date road closures etc. Plus a slightly better shortest path algorithm than eyeballing it.

To get back to shrubbery: I rather shrug. Because you're right that it's less important than roads. But by its nature as just the background colour, I believe it does not actually compete with street labels, at least not in the way that other labels do.