>>42415927Pic related: each red square should only give 1 POI in Pokemon Go. The rest shouldn't show under normal circumstances.
What happened is that people submitted portals with a bad location (intentionally), and then once they became stops, they were edited to their correct locations. If you look at the actual portals, they're all there in the correct places along the path. They do exist there. They are real. A moved stop/gym will stay as a stop gym even if it's moved into a cell with an existing POI. The "abuse" was someone creating them and getting them approved in an inaccurate place so that it generated a stop before moving them to the correct location.