alt Hacker NewsThis is a real problem for applications that need to deal with precise locations. For example, if you want to estimate the roof sizes using the aerial imagery and the LIDAR point clouds (e.g. the one from the USGS: https://usgs.entwine.io/data/view.html?r=%22https://s3-us-we... ).
The coordinates do not align precisely in many locations, exactly because of the actual motion of the Earth's surface. Tectonic plates, aquifer depletion, land sliding down the mountain slopes, etc. For practical applications, there are steps in the data processing to fit the different datasets together ("registering" one of them). As long as you have timestamped maps, you can reasonably reconstruct the current WGS84 coordinates by fitting the data together.
As geodetic problems go, though, this is trivial small beer stuff compared to, say, stitching together magnetic maps measured on different days or gathered in flight in different flight directions, or normalising continental scale radiometric datasets gathered across decades.
Modern digital post WGS84 mapping is a breeze compared to the days of dealing with chains under tension and stitching together across differing ellipsoids and datums.