I doubt people are actively giving less value or worth to places that appear smaller on the map. Additionally, the majority of people just don’t have a concrete

I doubt people are actively giving less value or worth to places that appear smaller on the map. Additionally, the majority of people just don’t have a concrete frame of reference of distances beyond how far we can see. As such, the only real exposure to vast distances at the scale of continents is going to be via maps, unless you have the privilege of being in LEO. It’s pretty rare that flat projection is useful for anything except trivial, surface information paired with the sort of infantilizing teaching that prompts students into pointing to their home country. If this is your only exposure to the world, it’s easy to see how you will begin to assign some value at a subconscious level. Any indirect representation of something larger is going to be a compromise based on the needs of the application, but we can do better than the flat projection just from a UX level.