Google Maps uses aerial photography from planes for the high-resolution layers of their maps, not satellite imagery.

Huh, interesting! I never knew that. So then I'll need to ask my father about what he was told again. Maybe something got misinterpreted along the way.

It probably was that you can see newsprint, not read it.

While it's true that the stars are very distant, the only atmosphere that the light passes through is same atmosphere the satellites have to peer through (resulting in the same amount of distortion)

Hm, but with angles, distance matters to right? Bending light 10 degrees will mean a much bigger difference light-years away than a couple hundred miles away. That said, I could easily be missing something...

The light isn't being bent light-years away. It is being bent at the beginning of the atmosphere, resulting in the same degree of bending as the satellite has to deal with.

All of the detailed views in Google Maps are actually aerial photography rather than satellite images. Much easier to get that kind of detail from 1500ft.