This one is always trotted out whenever the writer wishes to describe an area that could do with a lick of paint/ is a bit backward. And, yes, I’ve used it myself.
On a cliché level, it’s not the most obnoxious one out there, but it’s a shoddy simile. How can you compare a place to an action that nobody in human history has actually performed*?
*Unless I got the wrong end of the stick, and Back To The Future was a documentary.
/
Or, for anywhere in the Middle East that has a donkey standing beside a tree, “a landscape unchanged since biblical times”.
I think I’ve avoided this specific wording, though I’m sure I’ve written something vaguely similar about areas of former communist Europe.