We hated crate maps, because it felt like every dev for shooters back in the day was compelled to put at least one map in their games where you'd wander around and through crates in some type of warehouse. I could be mistaken, but I think the first Doom kick-started the whole thing. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my first exposure to crates a'plenty was in E2M2, pictured at the top of this post.
You see, maze-like maps in the '90s were the design equivalent of putting glowing mushrooms in caves: it was just what you did. It worked with the technical limitation of engines at the time. It offered a kind of difficulty back when there were no waypoint systems; it was expected that you'd wander around for a half-hour completely lost, and if you didn't want to do that you'd buy the strategy guide (which our family did with Doom because we kept losing our map sketches on physical paper).
And what better way to have a kind of narrative purpose for otherwise senseless mazes than a room full of haphazardly-arranged crates?
At first, it wasn't so bad. Mazes were kinda cool, and with games like Doom—back when we weren't desensitized completely to it—jump scares were plentiful as one rounded a corner directly into an imp's ferocious claws. But it became a trope, not only with released games but with custom content as well. It was easy to make a warehouse map when you only had to worry about a small handful of textures!
The problem was so pervasive that by the time Quake 2 was released, some smartass created a mod called CrateDM in which the deathmatch levels were warehouses filled with crates, and player models were crates as well. Arguably, it is the distant first ancestor of the "prop hunt" game.
Coming back to the original Doom via the remaster, there's a fair bit of nostalgia. It was the first "naughty" game I played, the game I wasn't supposed to play, but which my brother let me play on-the-sly. Wandering around E2M2 once again, I had a big smile on my face. This thing that got old quick, this design gimmick that is all but banished in modern games, I really did miss it.
Playing games that offered zero guidance whatsoever was, in its own way, a challenge we faced without question because we didn't have alternatives to judge it against. Those of us who were there and lived it, we aren't somehow more superior for struggling to find keycards in labyrinthine corridors. With considerable distance between then and now, I can appreciate crate maps as just one tool in a very large design chest, neither good nor evil, but when deployed well, it can serve to enhance the right game.
Simply put: we have options now, and if you want a guided, tightly-knit narrative experience, you will not be left wanting. If your bag is wandering around for an hour trying to find a switch you missed flipping among stacks and stacks of crates, you've got that choice, too. I'm not going to pat the game industry in its present incarnation on the back, but over the past thirty years or so a lot of clever and talented people put some serious thought into how games can be navigated and understood, and both devs and players are the better for it.