[benburleson]

I would be that's actually a majority of usage in the wild. Sometimes I'll zoom out if I need more context, but I'm not wandering around most embedded gmaps.

[tantalor]

My point was if that's truly the dominant use case then the map should be a static image initially and replaced with tiles lazily.

[bdon]

It is the dominant use case, and a static server-rendered image is more computationally expensive to generate than a tile-based system; a static image has effectively infinite variation in center, bounds and map scale, so requires dynamic computation from a server to send a JPEG/PNG. A tile-based system can just pre-generate a couple million tiles which is exactly the strategy Protomaps uses.