Actually, this issue isn’t a new issue as Americans for the last 4 decades have ranked last in geographic knowledge or reading a map.
My former supervisor who went through K-12 during the '60s and graduated from undergrad in the late '70s was astounded at how comparatively speaking, his much younger sister who went through K-12 in the late '70s-late '80s had far less geographical knowledge/ability to navigate with a map than he or most folks of his generation. He attributed it to a substantial neglect of geography in K-12 starting in the '70s.
While I do use google maps to find places I’ve never been to…I usually look it up and write down the street address before heading there.
Still find it odd how many folks…and not only millenials…lots of middle aged folks like most cc-ers glued to their smartphones apparently trying to look for a place while being apparently lost.