No. In my experience, the first thing that Google Maps does is send your location to Google, run an auction for local advertisers, then download a half dozen images of local "featured" businesses. On my old phone, Maps was snappy enough before they added that antifeature, and things went downhill from there. When I retired that phone last year, it could take over a minute just to show a map (often devoid of street names).

Now, I actually don't have a mapping app on my phone. It takes a little planning ahead, but I'm happier to do without.

For me at least it doesn't. Even just typing into the search field lags sometimes so that I have to stop a second to let the characters appear. Searching for a restaurant, clicking on it, reading the information can take whole 10 seconds and be so frustrating.

I use Google Maps many years already but it just became so slow in the last year or so. Maybe they just don't support non-high end phones anymore.

It's also slow on fast phones and feels like the ui thread is being blocked by something for several 100s of milliseconds. I stopped using google maps because of this. So annoying.

Do you know a good alternative?

I don't have a good alternative for points of interest (restaurants, ...), but for maps and routing I use https://www.locusmap.eu (with offline Locus Maps, Android only). For car navigation Waze, ironically an app from google, is also nice and has full congestion avoidance.

Same experience on a few years old lower end samsung phone. Rubbish.