im not sure i follow the logic of state boundaries being a useful level of granularity for any audience. if some suburb of Austin has a power outage affecting 10k people in a 3mi radius, that means i get to see 8.7% of the contiguous US land area turn yellow unless i specifically select to zoom to TX to discover that the affected area is 10,000x smaller?
Because our priority is having the page load quickly, and having to load data for 3k+ counties on a national map would slow things down. The state view is a compromise between speed and giving the user enough info to then go more granular by checking the state view they're interested in.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit: would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_