With a VPN you'll get the Google Maps basic underlay with streets etc but the overlay info is either not there or out-of-date in many cases. Not sure why or how, but GPS usually shows you about 500m from your actual location.
We haven't been in China since 2019 but back then a VPN let me access Google Maps but I found it of very limited use due to incompleteness. While it had a "map" of my SIL's house (where we were staying) it was really only a picture. Many, many tries at entering an address finally showed that if I gave half of the address it would correctly point to the main gate, but that it had no concept of any streets within, despite displaying the layout correctly. I found other less dramatic examples, also--it's missing a lot of fine detail and will reject as invalid any address that uses that fine detail. I do think there were cases of it being misaligned also, but I found the missing information made it of so little value that I didn't play with it much.
I believe the detail problem would be much less of a hindrance to a more ordinary tourist.