Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I’m in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that’s something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
Coming back to the map markings. It is also economics. How many players are going to use the feature versus how much work it is. It migh seem simple thing, but when you add option for player to write on the map there are lots of things you need to take in to account.
How many symbols can be used, what happens if the games resolution is changed from the settings, how the text wraps if its close to the edge of map, what if there appears new automatic map marker under text user has wroten, are there interactive symbols for fast travelling or something else, will those go under the text or on top, what if writing uses special characters etc etc. Not to mention if devs have been cute with the map and its not just a flat texture. Skyrims map for example is the game world and you can see storms on it. Spending time to make and test all those features when it really serves a tiny fraction of the playerbase is wastefull.
About saving the game. For better or worse its also a game mechanic and now days its not necessary about the limitation. For example if you could save in a middle of an battle in pokemon you could just save the moment you start a fight with shiny pokemon and you could infinetly try to catch it without any stakes. Or if you could save in middle of epic multiphase jrpg boss it would take away from the feeling of succes after long battle.
But i absolutelly agree games should atleast have exit save, so if real live happens and you need to close the game, it should not punish the player and loose their progression.