One of the problems with these circle charts is that most people aren’t very good at visually comparing areas. So to give a psychologically accurate impression

One of the problems with these circle charts is that most people aren’t very good at visually comparing areas. So to give a psychologically accurate impression you wouldn’t just want to scale the areas either (of course, most people would expect the areas to be scaled, so doing something else is also misleading). Just a bar chart does a much better job of conveying the relative quantities (of course, it throws away the geography part). I would recommend trying to find some other way than these scaled-circles-on-a-map thingies if possible. In any event, I think “intentionally misleading” is a leap. It seems likelier that the creator is not an expert in data visualization and wasn’t thinking carefully enough about how to make the plot.