Mainly lived inside Chrome's dev tools for many nights. Its deobfuscator and debugger is very handy. Still scratched my head lots of times along the way.
Some interesting stuff is still missing, e.g. no idea yet how they get octant paths from geo coordinates.
The obfuscation isn't necessarily a deliberate attempt at hindering reverse engineering, but a result of their optimizing JS compiler and Protobuf-to-JSON-bridge.