GoPro Max 2 bad photo timelapse quality vs extracted video frames ?

Basically what's in the title.

I just received the camera and have been quickly testing it in timelapse modes (I want to capture street imagery for Mapillary, Panoramax, etc...), but the photo quality looks like shit compared to the frames I can extract from a high-bitrate video.

Is this expected on GoPros in general ? Expected on the Max 2 ? Are there any solutions to this other than going through a cumbersome process of exporting a video, extracting the frames, and then somehow getting the correct GPS coordinates back into the EXIF data ?