The maple bacon burger is built around a sweet element that most burgers spend their whole design fighting, and making sweetness work is the entire problem it solves. A cheeseburger normally answers a rich, salty patty with acid and crunch: pickle, raw onion, sharp mustard. This build does something close to the opposite by adding maple syrup, usually as a glaze cooked onto the bacon, so the dominant counter to the beef is sweetness rather than tang. The reason it holds together is that maple carries a smoky, slightly bitter depth alongside its sugar, and that depth reads against the char of the patty and the salt of the bacon instead of sitting sweet on top of them. Balancing it is what the rest of the build is engineered to do.
The craft is in where the syrup goes and how the salt is kept in proportion. The maple is lacquered onto the bacon in the pan rather than poured over the assembled burger, so it candies onto the strip and concentrates rather than soaking the bun and turning it to paste. The bacon underneath that glaze is rendered crisp, because the snap of a hard, salty strip is the texture that keeps a sweet element from reading as dessert, and a limp strip would let the sweetness flatten the whole sandwich. The beef patty is still the fixed point, seared hard on a flat-top with the cheese added on the heat so it melts into the crust, and a sharp cheese is often chosen specifically to push back against the syrup. The bun is soft and sized to the meat, and any acidic element, a pickle or a raw onion, earns its place by being the brake on a build that is otherwise running toward sweet.
The variations are a matter of how far the sweet-and-salt axis is pushed and on which burger base. A cheddar-and-maple version leans on a sharp cheese to balance the glaze; a candied-bacon double stacks two patties and doubles both the bacon and the syrup; versions that add a fried egg or onion jam push the richness further still. Each of those keeps the founding rule and changes one element, which is the same impulse that pulled this build out of the plain bacon cheeseburger, and each deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.