Greenland has at least two reasons to be worth more then it is now: in the future when the north polar ice sheet melts. The arctic circle becomes a navigable ocean. It's a short way from USA and Europe to Asia (or Russia).
Secondly removing the ice means it's much easier to get the essential hydrocarbons underneath of which there are lots of and which many countries will want.
So the reasons for Greenland is geography, security, control, trade and economy. And by thinking long term. It can also explain some off handed and mocked comments about Canada too.
As I understand it, it's not the best location, it's just good enough and was very popular for historical reasons.
Well, no-one sensible. However.
"I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"
That’s noted very stable genius Donald Trump, there, on the enormity of Greenland, and why it would therefore be something which it is sensible to somehow try to buy.
I don’t think anyone thinks this, because it is bizarre. It’s just that at some point we stigmatized calling out stupid ideas as long as someone is purporting to speak on behalf of non-Europeans.
Graphical representations of things have an impact on preception and then by proxy on thinking. Maintaining aome degree of general awareness of these impacts leads to better thinking that is more reflective of the ground truth.
Some would call that "woke" with bad intentions, but hey, they got an agenda and that agaenda doesn't care about facts.
Bonus, it helps make clear what is wrong with many flat-earthers assertions.
(For further exploration of the ideals of maps, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State is excellent treatise for pulling the boundaries of the question back.)
Is it similar for other countries?
The channel island Jersey, for instance, more correctly "The Bailiwick of Jersey", is an autonomous and self-governing island territory of the British Islands. It is a British Crown Dependency with an independent local gouvernment, but not a sovereign state.
It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.
In addition to being rigorously equal-area throughout, other Equal Earth projection features include:
• An overall shape similar to that of the Robinson projection. (The Robinson, although popular and pleasing to the eye, is not equal-area as is the Equal Earth projection).
• The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
• Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.
> • The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
> • Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.
So why pick this over, say, Eckert IV or something from the Tobler Hyperelliptical family?
There is perhaps an additional argument (present on the wiki page [1], and elaborated on the paper introducing the projection [2]) that the equal earth projection is computationally easier to translate between lat/long and map coordinates, as it explicitly uses a polynomial equation instead of strict elliptical arcs. (This is the main argument presented against Eckert IV.)
The paper also lists some additional aesthetic goals: poles do not converge to points (ruling out Tobler Hyperelliptical), and meridians do not bulge excessively.
In fact, the paper describes Equal Area to be a blend of Craster parabolic and Eckert IV (then aesthetically tuned to avoid being stretched too much in either direction). It is also notable that the Equal Area paper measures both lower scale distortion and angular deformation for Eckert IV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections#pseudo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=doi.org%2F10.1080%2F136...
edit: I found https://map-projections.net/singleview.php which you can view a bunch of other possible candidates by selecting Pseudocylindric + Equal-Area.
Oh, and it was developed over a century ago, and already in common use when Arno Peters started his activism for the Gall-Peters projection (called this even though Peters made no refinements in independently developing a projection identical to Gall's 1855 work, and even initially mis-described it).