Business information in Apple Maps -- at least in the US -- comes from Yelp. I haven't really had the experiences you're describing, but I live in northern California, where Yelp seems to be pretty up-to-date most of the time. (With a caveat that it's been worse in 2020, but I suppose that's not unexpected for a crowdsourced directory during a year most of the crowd wasn't going out.)

I don't know if that's entirely true. I wouldn't say I lean on business hours in the app often, but things have gotten weird with Covid. In the last month I found a bunch of hours wrong in both Yelp and Apple Maps--they each had different wrong hours listed. Maybe Apple pulls from Yelp monthly or quarterly? Maybe Apple populated their own database years ago and maintain it separately? Whatever the method they each have their own way for users to report incorrect hours.

That is interesting! I haven't noticed discrepancies between Yelp and Apple Maps before, but now I feel like I'm going to have to start checking more closely. My assumption -- which now seems shakier -- is that if you reported an issue through Apple Maps, it basically got forwarded to Yelp.

I've had the occasional issue with location metadata but it's pretty rare in my experience