[sp8962]

First OSM existed and was already quite good many years before we got access to Bing imagery (2010). Undoubtedly there was a big boost in some types of mapping due to a reasonable quality global imagery source being available, mainly buildings, but it isn't as if we couldn't have continued without it.

Since then a lot of things have changed and the global imagery layers (currently Bing, ESRI and mapbox, all three using Maxar for a significant part) are, in developed parts of the world, mainly just used as a lesser quality fallback. As an example where I'm making right now, I'm using state level, a federal and a global (non-Bing) imagery.