Google is trying to build maps without human verification, because humans are expensive, and to some degree because humans can be tricked too.
Accepting content without verification certainly has a side effect of getting businesses on board the instant they open, too, but that's just a happy accident.
Google is fine with expensive (they sunk many billions into Maps over 10+ years and only just started monetizing it). But humans don't scale. If you want to have ten thousand data points about every business on Earth, you can't get there by relying on humans. You need to automate everything from top ot bottom.
Humans can scale, it's just that Google chooses not to use them. Anything that requires a human in the loop is something they won't do.
Customer service, not going to happen.
Having Youtube Kids actually have appropriate content for kids, unlikely.
Being a trustworthy source for businesses on maps, no way.
Google products have up to 2 billion users. It's nearly impossible to scale any human support to this size.
Because it's actually billions of users. It's a billion of users for Google Maps. It's two billion of users for Youtube. It's nearly a billion for GMail. And the requests for those different products have to go to different support personnel.
In areas where there's significantly less users they do provide human support, for example in GCP.
I work for a product with big numbers too. We have humans reading the support queue (with a lot of engineering to prefilter and group for bulk replies and what not). People may or may not like our support, or may complain it's not as good as it used to be, but it's there.
Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection in support. Users tell us what we're doing wrong, and what we need to do that we're not doing, and where we need to improve --- but only if you listen to them.
If it's impossible to provide human support for a system, and if it's possible to automatically exploit the system to affect a nontrivial fraction of users, then perhaps the system shouldn't have billions of users?
Google Maps does allow any user to submit edit request for place details (opening hours etc) and flag suspect entries. I guess one could be upset about this attempt to get users to work for free, but personally I don’t consider exploitative because (a) verifying local business is actually far easier for local people compared to anyone Google could hire and (b) Google Maps is such a useful product that the distinction to, for example, Wikipedia is less obvious than the simple for-profit/non-profit designation makes it out to be.
Accepting content without verification certainly has a side effect of getting businesses on board the instant they open, too, but that's just a happy accident.