Whole bunch cause it's my job.

Maps are super great and wonderful in all sorts of senses. ArcPro is sort of the gold standard, but really it's a monopoly. Esri, the company behind Arc, has software you can trial for free to check some things out and try it. Esri's website also has a TON of courses you can follow along with to understand the basics and then even more complex things.

That being said QGIS is FOSS and as far as I understand, very similarly capable as any Arc tool. I haven't done so myself, but it might very well be possible to have Q and follow along with the Esri tutorials.

I would suggest the Artifexian YouTube channel and his Worldbuilder's log, specifically the gPlates serie.

I've done some maps in GNU R.

Here's a (cropped) choropleth map I did for a discussion thread about legislative representation in Europe:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b6f28602-ab94-4901-b5e1-158061624c75.png

:::spoiler source if (!require("pacman")) install.packages("pacman") pacman::p_load_gh(c("ropenscilabs/rnaturalearth", "ropenscilabs/rnaturalearthdata", "ropenscilabs/rnaturalearthhires")) pacman::p_load( countrycode, dplyr, ggplot2, readr, rvest, tmap, tmaptools, viridis )

page <- read_html("https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_legislatures_by_number_of_members&oldid=1010580360")

df <- html_table(html_node(page, xpath = "/html/body/div[3]/div[3]/div[5]/div[1]/table"))

df$per_capita <- df$"Population/\nLower house seats" %>% parse_number()
df$name <- df$Country

europe <- df %>% mutate(continent = countrycode(Country, origin = "country.name", destination = "continent")) %>% filter(continent == "Europe")

shapes <- ne_countries(scale = "medium")
shapes_merged <- sp::merge(shapes, europe, by.x = "name", all.x = TRUE, by.y = "name")

map <- tm_shape(shapes_merged, projection =  "epsg:3035", bbox = bb(c(-8, 34.5000, 43, 72))) +
    tm_fill(col = "per_capita", palette = plasma(256), title = "persons", legend.reverse = TRUE) +
    tm_borders(col = "black") +
    tm_scale_bar() +
    tm_layout(bg.color = "#e6f7fe", outer.margins = 0, legend.outside = TRUE,
              legend.outside.position = "bottom",
              legend.position = c(0,.9),
              main.title = "Persons per Lower House Legislative Seat",
              attr.outside = TRUE)

tmap_save(map, width =  1920, height =  1080, dpi =  96, "map.png")

:::

And if so, what would you tell someone who is contemplating such a thing with no prior practical experience of such systems?

Depends pretty much entirely on what it is that you want to do and what software you're using.

@juergen_hubert you might want to add some #GIS tags there are quite a few map nerds on mastodon!