the errors while getting stuff from maps.google.com and probably googleapis.com seem problematic. your earlier screenshot showed maps.googleapis.com getting blocked by an ad blocker.
the Explore page does use Google Maps for mapping and location lookup. so if Google Maps components are getting blocked, then that would explain why map related features would not work, but the issue should manifest less as slowness than as just plain nonfunctionality.
you could try whitelisting the specific domains in your adblocker or disabling the adblocker altogether, and see if that helps.
it may also be worth noting that there was a previous change that should have more gracefully handled situations where maps.google.com was blocked, but i wonder if now it might need to also handle cases when googleapis.com is blocked, too. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxa-pages-are-blank-if-google-maps-is-blocked/26146/7.