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Going over my old textbooks of European Renaissance history, I was struck by the wild speculation of many of the maps of that era. Islands shown as peninsulas; shrunken continents; mythical bays; barbarian lands given lewd shapes. What was most striking was how cultural centrism warped the land to conform to a worldview. They said a lot about the people making them, and they were often beautiful and strange.
In Golarion, in my own games, I've often just taken cartography for granted. The world in the mind's eye looked exactly like the maps in the campaign setting. Characters have a modern confidence in the shape of things, knowing that the coasts are accurately mapped and it's only some interiors (i.e. adventure maps) that are in question. It's very unmysterious, which is a shame in a game of high adventure.
Is this a common treatment? Do most GMs act as though the PCs have an eagle's-eye view of the maps, or do they make it more mysterious? Has anyone made an in-game map of Golarion? Do the Chelaxians have different maps of the Inner Sea than Quadira?
This is just a rumination, but I'm always curious how other GMs establish a sense of place and time.
Much like minis, maps are representational. I show my players things. "You are here. Your ship goes here. Along the way, you see this." It doesn't matter if the map is inaccurate. The PCs see what the mapmakers saw... what convinced them to make the maps as they did. What I'm saying is that the PCs' view is the same as the NPCs' view.
I think it would be pretty logical that the mapmakers of Golarion has a better sense of the world than our own renaissance counterparts.
They have different tools at their disposal (fly spells, flying mounts, scry spells etc).
That said i wouldn't say that Golarian maps are equal to our sattelite images, some errors are bound to sneak in.