I recall when I first saw Ubers’s H3[1], it really reminded me of healpix (from grad school). I know the algorithm is different but similar problem space: “given a point on a sphere, assign it to a stable cell ID”
Uber unsurprisingly doing a lot of innovation in this space due to the spicy routing problems they have. If you want to test someone's geospatial knowledge in an interview, give them 45 minutes to "Design Uber" and see what creative solutions they come up with to solve the routing problems.