There's no way around the precision/recall tradeoff. Every map and business listing ever created has this problem; either you carefully vet listings, in which case you miss lots and by the time you publish they're out of date anyway, or you publish whatever you've got and a lot of it is crap.
You have to pick some balance of precision and recall. The yellow pages and paper maps did the same thing. They were handmade so they aimed higher on precision and lower on recency/recall. (Imagine opening a new business the day after the Yellow Pages has gotten dropped off at everyone's front door. You're screwed for the next year or whatever.) Maps hasn't picked the wrong balance; it's just a different balance that as a user you have to understand and account for.
A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and letting people fix issues when they're being harmed by google maps's mistakes. When I said "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys," I wasn't arguing that it is in fact possible to do it the way google is, just better. The argument is that doing it with a different business model or just not doing it are also options. Who knows what emerges? Maybe there's an alternate universe out there where google introduced an automatically gnerated encyclopedia and wikipedia was relegated to an openstreetmaps-like background, while people on alternate-HN argue about how alternate-google simply can't do any better because of how fundamentally hard the problem is (and it is fundamentally hard, no argument there).
Google provides lots of ways for business owners to fix their listings, and even lets individuals directly edit Maps. The case in this post happened to slip through a crack. Cases like this can (and sometimes do) lead to improvements to the automation and tools available to businesses. But if Google had a help line for people to call, they'd incur a huge opportunity cost in engineering time that could be better spent on valuable new features than minor improvements in data quality.
There's a second dimension, cost. Google is essentially in the same business as the ancient yellow pages directories, just almost infinitely more automated and cheap. Those predecessors didn't just select a different trade-off, they had high quality vetting baked into their expensive manual process without even trying. But the customer who could in theory choose between the cheap and the vetting isn't the victim of substandard vetting, so there is no market mechanism to slow that race to the bottom.
You have to pick some balance of precision and recall. The yellow pages and paper maps did the same thing. They were handmade so they aimed higher on precision and lower on recency/recall. (Imagine opening a new business the day after the Yellow Pages has gotten dropped off at everyone's front door. You're screwed for the next year or whatever.) Maps hasn't picked the wrong balance; it's just a different balance that as a user you have to understand and account for.