Seasonal and real time images are trivial for Google to allow as datasets, but they don’t want to pay for the churn of all that imagery. Just imagine how much compute, satellite, and people time it takes to achieve good results instead of lazily updating their maps every once in a while and pruning it like the artificial, adrift version of the world it is. I don’t think Maps makes a ton of money directly, so it makes sense why they don’t have the stomach for this expense.

It just has to be good enough for people to use it so Google can learn about you for advertising.

Eventually they should have enough data to stitch all different seasons together globally, no?

As the article highlights, it's not the lack of data. It's a decision conscious/unconscious on the part of Google to smoothen out what it shows

It's about Google Map, and maps in general being a false representation of the world.