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.
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.