...Metroid is poorly aged? Are you SURE?
I mean... did you see the graphics? AND there is no map.
By the by... no map is pretty much their reason for adding it to their list.
That's pretty valid though
Like hell am I going to try to manually draw a map for that game. Its idea of puzzles was "secret bomb-able wall with no clues".
I mean, it'd be one thing if careful cartography could hint at where the secrets (or direction of progress) was. Metroid Zero Mission and Fusion were designed as such - you could often figure out where the secret rooms were because they (usually) filled gaps.
This was not the case in Metroid 1 at all:
Making even a perfect map didn't really do anything for you, except help keep track of what doors you hadn't gone through - or walls you hadn't carefully bombed every inch of. You couldn't intuit anything about the rest of the map from what you'd discovered. There was no clue about where to go next.
Super Metroid was vastly superior. It added barriers that "required" (ha) certain items to progress. Superheated rooms, pools of lava, pools of lava with grapple points, speed blocks... The player needed to keep track of all these obstacles, so they could come back. Either in their head, or by sketching out a map. It didn't have to be grid-perfect is all, the game took care of that - which I think detracts nothing from the game. This was a video game, not DND or AutoCAD.
It also added superbombs and the scanner, which (well, once acquired) removed the inane tedium which was the primary "exploration" mechanic of Metroid 1. Super Metroid solved the issues of Metroid 1 and went beyond, becoming a classic which aged well. Though it's still too hardcore for many modern gamers, it's actually fair. Metroid 1 was not fair, and did not age well. I would recommend Zero Mission instead, or just Super Metroid sans prologues.
Metroid 2 was arguably even worse, mainly due to its limited platform. Which is a shame because it had some interesting innovations.
... Also, this is why they print those stupid lists. They're bizarrely compelling to comment on, either for or against.