Yes, that is something google maps excels in. Absolutely. But trying to compete here would mean they have to shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.
There are some intermediate options here. Osmand integrates Mapilary images (I'm not a fan personally), they have travel guides built in (they became usable now, even small cities have decent descriptions where I live) and tiny things like that.
On the other hand, OSM-based tools are crushing commercial maps in... being a map ;)
I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourcing datasets?
Thanks for the laugh.
That is not a flag "is the crossing wheelchair accessible?".
It's user created picture or text. This can be any kind of content, abusive, regulated by law, spam, subjective for chat control "age verification" controls, copyrighted and so on.
Moderation is a hard topic. Only very small communities can do that well.
Absolutely, can be abused. But there can be thousands of reviews of a pizza place, with text, surprising languages, slang, pictures... But only one description.
Sure, a 'description' or 'name' tag can contain something inappropriate (like a slur of defamation). If it has high impact, it'll be reverted quickly. If it has little impact, not a big deal. Many tools don't even show the 'description' tag
Pictures are a whole other level. You need to blur faces and license plates. What if someones house is photographed? How to detect inappropriate images? Should one study the laws of all countries? Even the freedom of panorama contains many differences between European countries, let alone privacy rights, ...
There is already plenty of apps which show them, like OsmAnd or https://cartes.app , https://osmapp.org or https://openclimbing.org where you can even upload the photos from the map UI
Keep in mind that Google Maps has a >1 billion yearly budget (citation needed, but other global maps have similar budgets)
You can go look up pretty much any tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Google Maps and there'll be dozens of user-contributed pictures of the interior, the menu, etc, but on OSM you'll be lucky if the opening hours are accurate.
I'm not sure there's a good solution to this, but certainly more OSM front ends exposing the data and contribution tools to end users helps.
OSM argues that it's a "map database" but it stores labels like "opening hours" and "social media links" - why stop there? The UGC vs non-UGC debate has been the biggest crutch of all open map projects and no one managed to solve it yet.