It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
Anything Non-Zork. Even Adventure from Don Woods was half-consistent in some places. But having an "odd" geometry matched perfectly the environment of a cave.
Not ZMachine related, not even with Inform6, where n_to, s_to and w_to e_to are pretty much self-explanatory. It's just that Dungeon/Zork/Zork-I-II-III were made that way.
This was never a technical oddity. This was generally a tool of verisimilitude: the real world isn't built on a clean square grid. You might have a diagonal hallway or a road that curves or a passageway between two "rooms" with a strange incline.
On the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.
Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)
It makes sense then. I haven't played zork for over 35 years. The last couple infocom games I played (Hitchhikers, LGOP) had more regular geometries, in my memory.
Oh yeah, Zork itself especially is meant to be a weird place and the geometry intentionally silly at times. Some of the geometry was built to be logic puzzles for fellow MIT students. It's impressive it was ever commercialized, much less successful enough that we are still talking about it today.
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.