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This is also true of cartography in my experience. Presenting someone with the familiar is good for reaffirming your priors but for true lovers of maps, they're not just information but the pleasure of surprise, realization, connection and discovery. There's not much to discover in the familiar.

A hot buzzword in GIS right now is "Digital Twin" which is a nearly complete copy of reality in a computer model. These look awesome and can be genuinely useful. But I already live in reality! Show me something different! Show me a slice of your reality that makes me question mine.

All maps are wrong. This is not a bug, it is a feature. That's the whole point. We already have an entire planet waiting for you outside. A map is useful because it condenses, slices and reveals something that we can't get from a person's vantage point. A map is useful because of its abstraction.

God yes. The Mercator projection, as rightly attacked as it is, is inaccurate. But it's also -accurate- because it's explicitly designed to be used for coast mappings. That mattered more than precision! That's literally teaching history!