Some discussion from the Discord
One user raises a fair concern - what if the best color for map art is something really expensive? (using a real example of a map that asked for diamond blocks)
Another user ponders a closed set of decorative graphics. I've been trying for a while to figure out making Eggcraft-exclusive decor, but Optifine is the main way to do that; getting everyone to use Optifine was hard enough before people realized that Optifine actually sucks, and now all of its functionality is across several replacement mods that aren't all up to 1.20.
Some more of my own thoughts
I think my main issue with map art is that it's just a lot more asocial than anything else you could do on a server, for something that otherwise could open up a lot of creative expression. It takes forever, uses up a lot of resources, takes up a lot of space (I was especially frustrated rendering our map and realizing that we don't actually have a lot of open oceans to just fuck around in)
And if there was a free way to do it, people could still do it for bragging rights if they wanted to, by having it be a place you could actually visit. Since generated maps won't actually exist in the world.