I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn't involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com/maps around that time, but I don't know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.
In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)
In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)