More likely, they have their own DB, or data lake, or whatever repository it might be, but it ingests the data from multiple sources.

It reminds me of this conspiracy that was circulating a few months back that Apple Maps had "deleted" cities and places in Lebanon to culturally erase it for Israel's invasion.

In reality (which you could see by e.g. looking at Reddit posts from a few years ago), Apple Maps' coverage of Lebanon was absolute unusable dogshit the entire time. There were complaints about how it wasn't even usable for basic navigation in Beirut. The city of Tyre (which was misspelled "Tyr") was still there despite being one of the hardest-hit cities by Israel's invasion.

Which was, to be fair, staggeringly incompetent, but it was provably true. Apple Maps' coverage sucked so badly that, at a surface level, it looked like somebody took an erase tool to a competent map.

I think a lot of people don't realize how automated corporate maps applications are. Which can be a weakness for crowd-sourced data like OpenStreetMap when there aren't enough contributors, but that democratization is also a huge benefit that anyone can see and fix issues. The main parts of Google Maps that aren't automated are points of interest, and those are kept up-to-date thanks to the network effect where e.g. business owners see value in maintaining their information or users feel like they're helping out (read: doing free labor for a trillion-dollar corporation).

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example.

To be fair, the average person doesn't know what sideloading is, while everyone will look at the map and see the changed name

I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.

I think this gets mentioned every single time one of these stupid name changes comes up.