Waze pointing out police and road hazards has saved my bacon a lot. Sometimes it routes me wrong, but sometimes I distrusted it's recommendation to go through a side street, only to slam into a huge traffic jam that it was routing me around.
Nowadays, I use Waze but look at the route, and if it is overcomplicated, I look to see if it did it for obvious reasons (traffic jams).
Apple Maps is pretty awful for me, it doesn't give enough detail on turns (like what lane to be in), and its POI database sucks. Too many times I've typed in the name of a place that's local and its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away. In non-US/European countries, like if you're driving in South America, don't even bother.
The current version of Apple Maps has lane guidance which works pretty well in the areas I've used it (around a fair amount of northern California, not just the SF Bay area, as well as the Tampa Bay area in Florida).
Google certainly has a better POI database, although for the example you gave ("its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away") I'm not sure whether the issue is Apple's database as much as its flaky searching of its own database. I tend to explicitly give it cities when I'm searching for businesses. I suspect if I were in another country, though, I'd quickly give up and just use Google.
Nowadays, I use Waze but look at the route, and if it is overcomplicated, I look to see if it did it for obvious reasons (traffic jams).
Apple Maps is pretty awful for me, it doesn't give enough detail on turns (like what lane to be in), and its POI database sucks. Too many times I've typed in the name of a place that's local and its first suggestions are in another state hundreds of miles away. In non-US/European countries, like if you're driving in South America, don't even bother.