Meanwhile, neither Sweden’s nor Norway’s capital is in the map. But two smaller Norwegian cities are.

I think this just teaches you the issue with discretization.

There are in fact five small Norwegian towns on this map.

Vadsø, Hammerfest, Trondheim, Bergen and Longyearbyen.

Denmark has a funnier case. There are 6 cities/town within the Kingdom of Denmark with 0 of them in Denmark. (5 in Greenland and 1 in The Faeroe Islands; Iceland belonging to the Kingdom until 1944 has 2)

Trondheim and Bergen rank 3 and 2 in Norway (after the capital, Oslo). Some 200k people live in each. Not so small by scandinavian standards.

But Vadsø, Hammerfest and Longyearbyen are tiny - population 2-12 thousand.

Cue to Sucuriju in Brazil, that has less than 1k inhabitants.

I like xkcd's description of Mercator: https://xkcd.com/977/

Mercator can be a very useful map. Angles are not distorted. It's also very good at low distortion at small scales. As you zoom in on a point, the area distortion diminishes. Once your area of interest is around 300km wide, the area distortion is only about one part in one thousand. It converges very quickly on a "true" representation of the earth.

Mercator's ubiquity isn't due to people who "aren't into maps" but rather because its strengths are really powerful in many use cases. Imagine the confusing situation if, in your favorite Maps app, North weren't always directly up, intersections met at wrong angles, and square buildings didn't always look square.

Those strengths being in navigation: straight lines in Mercator maps correspond to a constant bearing in the real world, which is really handy when your ship needs to cross thousands of kilometers of ocean.

I think the idea if to show the most populous cities in some area, not the density of highly populated cities, otherwise I would agree.