It's not just youth, it's people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.
I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.
In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I'd say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn't any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is "who was in boy scouts"
And it's not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it's been used as a joke in movies for decades. It's probably gotten somewhat worse since people don't use paper maps as much anymore, but there's also a "use it or lose it" aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there's probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven't had to in over a decade.