I'm going to test simplestmaps in my next geolocated project, I have had the same experience in the past. For the last geolocated notebooks, I decided to export coordinates and values to CSV, loaded them into Google Sheets, and used Google My Maps for viz.
I'm developing a suuuper simple geo data plotting lib in Python.
There are already plenty of tools, but I find them super complicated for simple stuff, requiring lots of plumbing code just to show a map with a point or an area, or to plot a geojson's contents.
Not anymore :D