Having grown up in the UK, looking at Ordnance Survey maps, I much prefer the multiple colours used for the road hierarchy, rather than the orange/yellow used by Google (and many others). But I agree that having motorways blend into rivers and trunk roads blend into trees is a bit of an issue.

One other difference I note between Google and OSM Carto is that the road names are often bigger than the road line, which improves readability, rather than squeezing the text between the casing lines on OSM, arguably another reason to consider removing the casing on minor roads at lower zoom levels.

pieleric - Thanks - that was a typo - which should be fixed now.