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I don’t think that’s a particularly easy refusal? It’s hard to articulate any principle for rejecting the name change other than “cmon it’s really obnoxious”, and there’s far too many place name changes for the Google Maps team to review them all for obnoxiousness.

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Every other nation on Earth calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it some other nonsense name (it's not even majority in US territorial waters) does users a disservice.

"The review process is tedious" is a non-excuse. It's the largest geographic feature in this quadrant of the globe to receive a name "change" in my memory, and it's highly politicized.

Should Google refuse to show Korean users the "East Sea" because the rest of the world calls that body of water the Sea of Japan? Or tell the Arab countries that "Persian Gulf" is the only correct name? The fact that these kind of name changes are highly politicized is more reason, not less, to adopt whatever the user's government considers to be correct.

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