It has to be combined with good zoom functionality. If it had that, this type of interface would work well. But, most of today’s interfaces aren’t navigable via zooming. It’s all paged and context-driven.
If you had a 36000 page phone book presented densely on a single page, it’d be easy to find what you wanted via browsing if you had access to tools that facilitated whipping across and around the image and zooming in and out quickly to inspect the detail.