I wasn't on any servers when it happened - I was either in a singleplayer world, or on the main menu screen (I reproduced this bug twice)
I was able to confirm that the server I was playing on has indeed changed their view distance. I would still urge someone to look at this case as many servers nerf the view distance to gain extra performance but otherwise, the issue is not with vanilla MC.
I can confirm something very similar, placed map in item frame on multiplayer server, removed it (somehow got mutiple copies) and the map no longer functioned, no position indicator, and it would NOT fill in areas that were unexplored.
Uh... I did attach the crash report.