I am glad that others are noticing that change, too. I do believe it was a change necessitated by the Switch, but was also half ideological. In World, the Ancient Forest showed where they could go too far with the map design.

Even today after how much I played that game, if it weren't for the guidance bugs I would get lost in that forest because of how mazelike it is. I do actually prefer Rise's maps that have no loading zones, but are not as gigantic and mazelike, instead more vertical.
though I do wish there were more of them, but remember that Rise is made by a different team than World, so not committing to all of World's design decisions doesn't necessarily mean they're gone, as we move back into a new game developed by the World team once again.

I also feel that there is more to the transition from hunter to killer than the maps. The speeding up of gathering animations, the removal of most gathering and miscellaneous quests in World and Rise means that instead of having a lot more pacing variety in what you could be doing, it's pretty much constant back to back large monster hunting, and if you want to change pace you have to play a different game instead of tackling some backlog gathering and transport quests.

I do know that I'm likely in the minority as someone who wants more non-hunting quests back in the games, and who didn't like that gathering continually gets more and more streamlined out of the game as the series goes on, but I think that the monotony of being constantly railroaded into hunting and more hunting may eventually hit a breaking point.