There might be something in that, yes. Obviously I don't know the details of Google's internal tech, but certainly that's true of the OSM equivalents: Mapnik (p

There might be something in that, yes. Obviously I don't know the details of Google's internal tech, but certainly that's true of the OSM equivalents: Mapnik (produces raster tiles) is much better at label placement than Mapbox GL (renders vector tiles).