Spent most of my career in GIS. So, not a map person as much as a map data person. I do work with actual map makers though and get first look, editing and testing privileges.

A map made for a specific purpose will almost always be hand tuned. The first, second...nth draft might mostly or completely auto-generated but the final product (for a good product anyways) will be hand edited. It could be additional graphics, legend or chloropleth tweaking, emphasis or de-emphasis any of the thousands of things you can tweak on a digital document that is also mostly graphical and part art.

So tools for better intent manifestation, even more rapid live visualizations etc. Someone linked an Esri story map video in this thread and that's a good example of state of the art for map generation right now.

There's lots of room for innovations on the data side of things. Making spatial relations to non-spatial data. There's no unified spatial query language that allows arbitrary length depth, lambdas and subqueries. Yes there are spatially aware relational databases but it's a dream of mine to build a universal spatial query language that can do something like

Relate river to city

by nearest ordered by city.population

where river.distancefrom(max_elevation(city)) < 100

and max_elevation(city) < 0

Select river.name, (river.width.nearest_point(city)) as width, etc