I\'m trying to do what seemed to be an easy thing but has resulted in some confusion. I\'m trying to have a link going to Google Maps with the destination address pre-filled
What you expect to be the users location is not what you expect, "current location" will be taken by google as any other address, and google tries to find a place that matches the query.
When somebody told you that "current location" will force google to resolve the location of the user, this is wrong.
You may geolocate the user on your own and then create the link based on the geolocation-result.