I'm also not a master of nor have a 1cc of any of these yet, so take with a grain of salt
Pre(r)amble: Pac-man, the iconic granddaddy of the genre, never did much for me. However, my first taste of appreciation for these game came with Universal's Lady Bug. It had a really nice set of scoring systems: timed "medals" à la Raiden DX or Psikyo games, letter collection to get extends, and doors that can be used to alter the flow of the maze.
What really cemented my interest, however, is Konami's Amidar. It introduced to me what I felt is the core appeal of these games to me: omniscient information but localized action. Amidar is based on an old folk randomization method, Amidakuji, that works from completely deterministic behavior: your enemy will always turn if possible. Yet, the sheer number of them combined with the increasingly twisted layouts means that while you can formulate a strategy and predict them, in practice you can't memo the game and have to keep revising as you go. This combo of planning and improvisation makes the genre a good halfway between stealth and action, that flow of in-control helplessness and bursts of payoff is very different from stuff like shooter or brawler games.
A brief summary of other good stuff:
- Mr. Do! (1982, Universal): Once you learn how to dig zig zag, which im still bad at, getting the highly situational apples to fall on your enemies at the right time is intoxicating scoring.
- Toy Pop (1986, Namco): Is a shooter as well, but still makes the maze relevant because of an element shot system. Basically, enemies in the game are only vulnerable to a specific shot type (car & tires, balloons & pins, etc.), and those shot types are scattered around the maze. The scoring encourages quick extermination of all enemies, and you can really get yourself in a bad position if you just shoot everything willy nilly and not have the correct shot type at hand
- Rompers (1989, Namco): Using the walls of the maze to crush multiple enemies at once for score is great. Trying to milk this while the timeout enemy chases seems pretty fun. ETA: so i played a bit more and it turns out the scoring is much simpler than that: try to finish as fast as possible, and occasionally set up wall that crushes multiple enemies + collect treasure by knocking walls in a certain way. I misunderstood a replay where someone milked only in 1 level
- Don’t Pull (1991, Capcom, from Three Wonders) & Pengo (1982, Coreland): The block pushing games. I like the raw difficulty of Pengo, but I must admit the smaller screen size and more robust score-given levers in Don't Pull allow for a quicker, more aggressive game.
- Tinkle Pit (1994, Namco): The unusual ball and chain attack, where you plant your weapon and try to get as many enemies to be hit by it at once, combined with item collection, is wonderful.
Some games I don't vibe with personally, but is interesting enough to be someone else's favorite:
- Mouse Trap (1981, Exidy): Another gate-manipulation game like Lady Bug. This time your are given on-demand but limited power pellets, so scoring involves both item-chaining and enemy chaining. To balance this out, there is an invincible hawk enemy that you can only shake off if you enter a teleporter at the center, which is easier said than done once the speed of the enemies increase along with the overload of the gate system.
- Haunted House (1982, Atari): Also proto-survival horror, but has enough elements of maze games to qualify. It's a multi-screen affair where you navigate a haunted house to retrieve items. The main challenge is the roaming monsters and the omnipresent darkness, and the fact that you can carry only an item at a time. This means you frequently have to choose between defense and progress, and to spice things up there is an enemy that can shuffle your items if you drop them!
- Pepper II (1982, Exidy): Amidar, but zipper nodes that can allow for areas to be completed piecemeal or whole, also has a pac pellet. Uses a different AI for enemies from Amidar.
- Intrepid (1983, Nova Games): Another multiscreen affair. This time you are infiltrating an embassy to collect various items to break into a vault in the top floor. One of the more straightforward enemy-manipulation games: you can't attack the guards at all, and have to shape their path via the maze and your own movements to escape.
- Girl's Garden (1984, Sega): An item collection game with some very interesting systems. You need to collect 10 flowers and bring it to the center, but those flowers bloom in a cycle that affects what they give you depending on the stage they are on, from giving you nothing to halving your collection! What complicates this is that they seem to grow randomly across the terrain, and hunting you are bears that behave like proto-stealth goons, having an aggro-range that can be disable via a limited use item, or scrolling them off-screen. Rocks can block you, and lakes actually kill you, so you have to determine if it's worth it to go for a particular flower or not, whether taking the risk means a perfect storm of stuff blocking you.
This 
Don't have time to write impressions right here, but feel free to ask for any specific game.
