It works with maps since they are fundamentally spatial, every country has its fixed position on the globe which doesn't change. With most other data there is n

It works with maps since they are fundamentally spatial, every country has its fixed position on the globe which doesn't change. With most other data there is no intuitive way to map the data into a 2D space and it gets even worse when that data frequently changes, completely changing whatever layout scheme you might have come up with. A little bit of zooming can still work great when you have a very limited item count, e.g. Mission Control on MacOS to manage windows or thumbnail view of tabs in some browsers. But as core UI for the whole OS it gets quite confusing when you don't really have an intuitive understanding of where things should be.