Well that, AND prioritizing their Maps product above better offerings in the marketplace in search results early on in its lifecycle, when it was trying to get scale and data to improve while hurting competitors.
There was Mapquest, and to my memory, Google came out of the starting gate with something close to feature parity with them.
This was also when traffic spiked to Google Maps and away from MapQuest / other competitors. And when you look at the data, the change in traffic is not due to users searching for "Google Maps" in the query more - but rather Google just linking to its own results more. [2]
It was when I knew the whole "Don't be evil" motto was bullshit.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-linking-to-yah...
[2] https://searchengineland.com/comscore-to-report-google-maps-...