Most maps you see are pretty misleading
But I usually use a quick little India-Greenland test to see how off one is.
India is about 1.5x the size of Greenland… if I were to try and trace the country shapes on a globe and cut them out, you can see this pretty well.
But here’s what most paper maps show instead…
Greenland is often way larger than India… sometimes four times as big.
The reason this happens is that distortion is inevitable when you’re going from a 3D sphere to a flat projection, and whenever you try and compensate you usually wind up with a funny shape and have to splice through countries.
It doesn’t have to biased against countries closer to the equator though and in fact could favor them. But don’t forget most map makers live in the Global North.