I remember having to do an image map as part of a web design project in school, circa 2005. True to 2005, the image was one simple rectangular banner at the top of the page, with text for different pages like About and Portfolio etc. placed along it. It felt like a (cool) hack that you could define regions for the text to route to different pages on click.

Of course we have modern solutions [0] nowadays but that sure seemed cool 20 years ago!

0: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

Map wasn’t really the thing that enabled all of those designs, even though it was certainly often used to build them.

We just didn’t have a million and one layouts and device sizes to handle back then and so you could get really creative with available space. Even CSS Zen Garden later on had designs that worked much better on the limited screen sizes of that era - which don’t work well today.

Flat design trends killed off the rest of it I think.

I mean, its still in the spec. Go for it!