As someone who's spent a fair amount of time hiking, it really depends on the maintenance of the trails. There's also often false trails even on maintained ones

As someone who's spent a fair amount of time hiking, it really depends on the maintenance of the trails. There's also often false trails even on maintained ones. Humans tend to be far more confident about their directionality than they are, and factor in weather or a dark mostly moonless night and its easy to hike in circles. Once lost and without easy landmarks, finding your way back is difficult as even if you locate the trail you're looking for, its uncertain if you're actually on it without glaringly obvious geographic markings to match to a paper map. We humans easily overestimate our ability to navigate. I do agree though, not packing a GPS unit with a charging mechanism was a bad move. The one time when I really needed it was the one time I was hiking in white out conditions on a very remote mountain in Cascades and my buddy had an GPS (mind you in the early 2000s, thus archaic by today's standards), Setting a way point at the trailhead made my night a lot more pleasant rather than shuffling down a mountain in a blizzard, and hoping to end up near where we started. I wasn't unprepared and had a paper map and compass, and knew eventually we'd hit a forest service road but it could have made for a very long night in the cold as we marched back to our vehicle.