The original and early bush trips were indeed using VFR for navigation. Then for a while, when Perfect Flight first took over as the content partner that produced bush trips for the World Updates, what you experienced was happening. The community made mention of that problem, and the last like 3 World Updates, the bush trips are again back to VFR navigation.
If you are on PC, there is an addon on flightsim.to that will end up showing the purple navigation line, and for those bush trips that were done referring to location names, you can just follow the path to see the sites. Or make use of the heading and the timer.