This is competitive pressures at work, similarly to IBM and other's investment in Linux in the early 2000's as a way to place competitive pressure on MS/Windows.

If you're not the leader in the field, and won't be able to catch up just by investing, you try to make the leadership in the field (Google's) irrelevant.

If the 2nd-best-by-small-margin base map info is open, having the best one isn't a competitive advantage anymore.

Second best? At least in my experience, OSM data is leaps and bounds better than Google Maps in every way possible, and it has been that way for a couple years now. The reason that I still use Google maps is that it's fast and well-integrated with my phone, and it has a lot of added features on top of the actual mapping that makes it very useful --- things like location sharing when you're on a longer road trip, creating a notification on your phone to route to an address from your browser, live traffic information, road closures, and business reviews. In terms of the actual data, though, the details available on OSM puts Google's data to shame.

I've been trying to get Google to fix an incorrect path drawn at a state park that I frequent. I've submitted an alternative route twice now, but it's been denied twice with little explanation. The path is a loop, but Google has it missing half of the loop, off by an eighth of a mile or so, and has it drawn where it cuts through private property. In contrast, OSM's data is completely spot on with what my GPS shows.

The park is in a tourist area, and I go to this park often enough that I've actually ran into multiple people visiting who have been standing on the trail with Google Maps open on their phone, thinking they've made a wrong turn.

I've experienced the same thing at GNP in Montana, BWCA in Minnesota/Canada, and all along the Richardson Highway in Alaska. If you're in a rural area or on public land, OSM data is the best available --- even better than what a ranger station would sell you.

Just another reply saying "OSM is completely useless where I live".

If I enter my street address into Google Maps, it shows my house. If I enter it into OSM it says "No results found" and can't even figure out what country or city I am in.

Just out of curiosity, have you looked into what data is missing? Is the house (or at least the street) mapped, but missing the street name or the house number (assuming you live somewhere where these are relevant), or is the street completely missing?

OSM doesn't support/understand the street numbering scheme used in my country. If I rewrite my address in the format OSM thinks I should be using, then at least it can find the street I am on. But I'm not going to write addresses differently just for one website...especially when Google Maps understands how we write addresses.

You mean the search box doesn't handle it well?

How does https://photon.komoot.de/ do?

Yes, it works. Well, it is missing the location but it at least understands the format. What is it doing differently from the OSM site?

openstreetmap.org uses Nominatim:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim

The photon link uses Photon:

https://github.com/komoot/photon

Nominatim processes OSM data, associating items of interest with features like town boundaries that enclose the item, or place markers that are nearby, and then is also a fairly pedantic search interface for that data.

Photon takes the data that Nominatim generates and sticks a more flexible search on top of it.

Checking for/creating an issue for Nominatim describing the address format that doesn't work well would be a useful thing to do, as global support is a goal there.