It’s funny what different people will consider torture or not
I guess the idea is that over time you'd learn to navigate without needing the turn by turn instructions that a smartphone spits out - like how people used to do it. It wouldn't just be to break smartphone dependence, but to gain a sense of direction if that makes sense?
Though your point about the phone/map telling you if the shop is open or not is a pretty strong advantage
But as someone who has never really had a problem with my smartphone, taking photos of a map and trying to pan around on a dumb phone sounds like pure torture. I can’t imagine it working well for any of the locations I actually need to pull up a map for, which are almost exclusively far away and require long sets of directions.