I’d say it’s an unintended default mechanism, but there are certainly better narrative ways to convey locations. If the player gets a list of locations, you could implement GO TO location and dump the compass rose completely. Of course, this is not a trivial change to most IF platforms, since I think all of the parser-based systems use the compass rose as a root design element.
From a platform design perspective, I like the idea of making locations a root element, but movement would be a separate module you include. Such modules might be compass-directions, ship-directions, nautical-directions, goto-directions, spatial-directions, or spherical-directions.
It’s an interesting thought-exercise.