Writers and mappers are sometimes lazy. But sometimes they're following the Principle of Minimal Difference. I just made that term up, but it's real, and it's crucial. Say you have a carefully crafted conlang, in which "north" is "boojim", and "west" is "ricker". Those might be fine to put on a map, because no matter what, I'm going to think of that river as reaching north by northwest. I don't speak Gaznotherian. In fact, presenting any more than a token amount of terms in a story in Gaznotherian would slow me down and confuse me. Which would get in the way of the story.
If Gaznotherian uses a non-Latin script, to label a map in it serves to generate a little bit of flavor, and so much confusion that I won't be able to mentally say cities out loud (how my reading mind works) -- I'm reduced to recognizing multi-token blobs of Gaztext as shapes. Lousy way to treat the reader. And since the primary point of a map is to convey spatial information, the mapper who insists on Gaztexting his book's maps is half-failing from the git-go.
It's really the same as the map before you put ANY labels on: any map that isn't an infinitely zoomable google satellite view HAS to generalize some. There's probably a couple of semesters of instruction in a cartography curriculum in deciding how much to generalise, in what way. But if you present the river or road at true width , they disappear into a tiny fraction of a pixel. Your true-elevation globe turns as smooth as a cue ball. The rugged coast looks the same as the smooth one, til you exaggerate the bumpiness. Generalization is not an evil compromise to be denigrates, it's an art and a craft that makes a map a useable tool.
While blithe ignoring of the fact that alien / olden / outlander folk talk, walk, and think differently ( c'mon StarTrek - does EvErYoNe speak English?!) (don't give me "universal translator": usually there's no trouble understanding) (Hitchhikers' Guide notwithstanding (google "babel fish) ) is an irritant, without such ignoring, ALL science fiction would have whole boring chapters of "and they spent ten years figuring out how to say "I would like a low- arsenic alcoholic drink please" instead of " yo mama has lousy morals and you were raised in a barn" ". Ditto most fantasy encounters would end up "but they couldn't understand me so we threw axes at each other until we all died". So the "unrealistic" translation of prose and map into the reader's language is a necessary shorthand. If it bugs you enough, make parallel map & text in English and in Gaznotherian, but your readers will care more that you spent the time crafting good plot and deft characterization. 100,000 words of Lorem Ipsum text is NOT gonna get anything but a cursory glance.
I've done that, a little. The country I built in Scandia (see one of my CG Albums) was intensely multilingual and multiethnic, so the mock web pages I made had some bad-French, pseudo-Czech, and garbled-Hungarian. But only enough to make the point, and after all the welter of tongues and jurisdictions was a pivotal point of the society I was portraying. On a map, it's enough to base different nations' labels on different earthly languages, and be done with it.
UNLESS it pleases you to go to the same linguistic detail as to invent a world full of dialects and scripts! In which case go for it - just don't be so irritated you don't enjoy others' fiction or mapping, when they use shorthand.
And to return to the actual point of your rant ;-) there really are reasons for maps that don't bother to show features that some users would really miss. Depends strictly on the point of the map. More generalization - if I'm not using it to travel by boat, which rivers are navigable matters not.
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