No, that is to say that the TB2 game world is more like the board in Monopoly than it is like a map of Atlantic City, NJ c1929. It serves its purpose, as do the game's rules and procedures. Mapped areas are easy to traverse because we paid a substantial grind cost up front to earn that. Even so, if you think about it, what did we earn? It is just NARRATIVE FREEDOM as no matter where Awanye, Jasper, and Jacob are on the map, they will start hitting the grind! It is merely color, just like the names of the properties in Monopoly are mere color. Our PCs may now decree that they have hiked to the top of the mountain. This is fun and cool, we now get to have a story about exploring the other side, instead of repeatedly replaying a narrative of making the climb (until inevitably some bad dice luck killed us probably). I'd note that we could have, instead, constructed a permanent camp partway up, and stockpiled a bunch of food and whatnot there instead. I'm not sure of the relative grind costs and risks vs rewards of each of those options (mapping vs building base camps). Anyway, as you can see, this is all very gamist, but it also does serve to allow for a more interesting narrative, and we can make trade offs between the two.
This is pretty much what I was going to say (maybe with a
different board game, though). Mapping is a fair bit like the little lightning-bolt cursor in original Myst that let you go someplace you'd already been and skip intermediate screens (which took minutes to load on CD-ROM drives of the time). Or teleport nodes in MMOs like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. You have to find them first, but once you do, you get to skip everything in between. Pure convenience to get to new challenges.
More generally....
All of the genre/setting emulation in this system is, as
@Manbearcat stated, a veneer—which the GM and players are free to lay on thinner or thicker and spend as little or as much time describing as they want. But, the rules are not concerned with such things. They
do offer content in the form of classes and races and such that fit the genre & setting, but those ultimately wind up being bundles of rated attributes you use to deal with challenges, for which there are rules, and rules, and rules (and seemingly an exception to every rule, sigh).
A lot of the mechanics (Belief, Creed, Goal, Instinct, Traits, twists) look like narrativist tools, but their uses in the game are blatantly about gaining bonuses to tests or aquiring one of the game's several currencies that are used for...gaining bonuses to tests, or introducing a new challenge to be resolved by tests, or being able to transition from one game phase to another, thereby enabling different kinds of activities (which are resolved via test and for which there is another currency! so many currencies, sigh). Again, the GM and players are free to spend more or less time talking about the narrative impact of these things, but the primary purpose is overt: to define a complicated state machine you have to master and work through to overcome challenges.
Does this mean Torchbearer
completely lacks simulation or narrative elements? No; the game—like many modern boardgames with their thematic art and fluff text—would be dead boring to most players if the veneer were stripped. But its priorities are clear.