That might work if you then apply a translation to the center point in pixel-space. But what if you need to send latitude and longitude to your front-end, or ot

That might work if you then apply a translation to the center point in pixel-space. But what if you need to send latitude and longitude to your front-end, or other display system? How do you translate your 2d polar coordinates to a change in spherical polar coordinates (lat+lon)? For small distances near the equator, it may not matter. Otherwise, it might. The article could have helped answer your question by providing some images to illustrate the flaws with other solutions that the author tried.