Do you feel the same way when this appears in pro play? I think some of this trend is driven by how prominently similarly artificial maps feature in major tournaments under the auspices of "being competitive" or whatever other nonsense is used to justify such ugliness. It is a trend that should be stopped there as well: a big part of the game is (supposed to be) adapting to the situation at hand but from what I have seen custom scenario maps with more or less predetermined geography tend to deemphasize this aspect in favor of executing set build orders and micro. Not exactly consistent with what I always hear about AoE2 relative to a certain other RTS you mentioned in your post.
i would hope that RM competition involves random maps instead of fixed maps. but i also don't think that ranked play needs to imitate pro play, and especially not for teamgames.
for example, pro play doesn't really involve random civs, but that was commonplace in ranked teamgames (before DE made that a rarity). it's just a different environment with different stakes, so the settings should also be different. we aren't playing for money or for the entertainment of viewers; we're just playing for fun and the entertainment of the players involved.
position-picking is similar. it's a nice option to have for tournaments. but when you're just playing normal matchmaking, it reduces the replability of maps by a lot. just look at what happened to 3v3/4v4 arabia. the combo of the same xbow-specialist civs & cavalry-specialist civs stifles all other strategies. the whole concept of transitions and tech switches has basically disappeared. we don't have mongol players figuring out how to afford mangudai. we don't see china or huns. all we see are civs that make the same unit from start to finish. there aren't any vulnerabilities or swings or opportunities for counterplay. it's just deathballs that keep getting bigger.
the basic issue is that ranked has very few maps, so each individual map gets played way too often. having scenario-like maps and settings that cause scenario-like games is a really bad fit for this environment. it might be fine for tournaments because they only play each map once and get to do stuff like drafting and civ bans, but the rest of us just end up playing mirrors.
i guess learned something new today.(This said, do note that at least Socotra is a real place 11.)
anyways, a lot of the AoK/AoC maps are named after real places, but still yield random maps. it sounds like they should put Socotra in the Real World maps section and leave RM for random maps