The argument for maps and folds is the same as the argument for structured programming in general: using common/reusable idioms brings clarity and familiarity.
It's the recognizability, not the terseness, that brings clarity.
Although Python's approach is not terse -- `fstyle = [f(x) for x in arr]` -- it is eminently recognizable.
Your argument is not really about anything I specifically said; and without something to counterbalance, it argues against structured programming, too.
My argument is that "recognizability" is in the eye of the beholder. One programmer's "map is a powerful abstraction over transforms, for example loops" is another's "this is some cutesy code/math creole by a CS graduate who desperately wants to find nails to apply his functional programming and applied math hammer on".
That's a fairly harsh way of saying that at some point the abstraction isn't clarifying, whether it's recognizable or not.
Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of functional idioms (they're one of my favorite parts of Rust, for example). I'm not so much a big fan of absolutism or over-generalization.
No, maps are conversions between types containing other types. Maps are much more powerful than just doing something over an array in languages that support a functional style.