It's intended use was misinformation but perhaps not in the way you imagine.

Rather than producing credible images, these sorts of projects undermine actual credible images.

For example, if you're team zion, then when shown images of how devastating Israel's attack on Gaza has been you can just disregard them as "probably fake".

"Oh pish posh, a child can create these images on google maps".

I would've asked it to turn my city into a Warhammer 40k battlefield.

I'm guessing that either a few devs thought it could be a cool toy and never gave a second thought about the ramifications (I can remotely understand that) or a bunch of managers who just dont give a shit thought they could monetize it