I believe what you noticed is true. That Google Maps does have a tendency to prefer slightly more difficult roads as "shortcuts". For example, Waze, which is a

I believe what you noticed is true. That Google Maps does have a tendency to prefer slightly more difficult roads as "shortcuts". For example, Waze, which is another decent GPS app that Google owns and sources data from, even has an option for this! It is called something like "avoid difficult roads/intersections".