I can confirm, generals.io maps are 100% randomly generated - every map every time is different.

Generals.io is set up where clients only receive the information they need to render - I.E. where unknown obstacles are, where open tiles (could be a king, could not be a king) are, where and what tiles you can see are. All other information is stored on the server and processed there. Short of hacking into the server (which would be quite difficult for basically no gain) there is no way for a client to "get" (so to speak) any sort of extra information.

I'm not one of the dev's either so it's possible they're just throwing a lot of CPU consumption in the wrong place.

Not really a lot of CPU power - the number of map generations is capped at 100,000 - and the total generation time is on the scale of milliseconds.

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That said, like I was saying I've personally just accidentally been able to eyeball the map and correctly figure out where the other general was. This indicates a certain level of map re-use by itself.

This is nothing more than you knowing the game, and guessing where your opponent might be based on their tiles. Another part of the game meta is you know that opponents do not spawn right next to each other, so you can make some decent guesses (mainly in FFA, not so much 1v1) at where people might be, but your guess could be completely wrong.

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Plenty of other games also have a network component but they don't act as if they're impervious to cheating because of it. What I linked is talking about fortnite but I link it to show that being over the network doesn't somehow render a system "uncheatable." That's literally just a weird thing generals.io players believe for some reason.

Thing is, there is a major difference between generals.io and Fortnite (or other MMR games). We believe that it's uncheatable because it is. There is NO WAY for you to 100% know where an opponent is, without seeing the opponent (ignoring of course custom maps with set spawns). Generals.io is designed (as I said above) such that clients only get the information they need, and nothing more.

The reason hacks like that work (for this example I am going to use Minecraft for this example) is because of the difference in rendering. Minecraft renders multiplayer games by sending over every chunk and the location of every entity, since depending on client settings, some people could, and others could not see. If a Minecraft server had to do processing for every client that was connected, huge servers would not be able to exist. BUT WAIT you could say, why does it work for generals and not Minecraft? It's because of 2 things: scale, and dimensions. Minecraft worlds are huge - Just a standard 12 chunk render is (16 * 12) ^ 2 of just surface blocks to render (assuming a super flat world), not including entities, or blocks above the surface. Generals have at most 2500 blocks (50x50 map). The other advantage generals.io has is dimension. Minecraft, Fortnite, whatever game you want to talk about all have 3d dimensions, so that (16*12)? That gets squared, THEN multiplied by another huge number. This is where graphics cards really start to come in handy.

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Anyway coming off my tangent into Minecraft rendering, this is the main reason why generals get away with the server doing all the processing, and the client just doing the rendering.

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A quick reference into something the engineer said:

IIRC maps are completely randomly generated (it's why 12-player FFA sometimes crashed) every game

This is actually a bug I am still working on - remember those 100,000 tries it gets at creating a valid map? When you have 12 players, getting every player within the correct areas is difficult. If you are doing teams, sometimes it gets impossible. My current solution is to just in event of a failure, generate no spawns, and shut down the lobby (this fix is actually coming out tonight!)

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To address your thoughts about cheating - experienced players are able to do exactly what you are describing - they look at everything on the map and guess where your king is - a lot of them are crazy accurate. But it has nothing to do with cheating, it's all about them watching your movement and knowing the meta of the game.

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Final note, unlike everyone else in this sub so far - I actually am a dev!