In the part of the world I study, they were the product of either colonizing efforts or internal modernization efforts in the 19th century. This often coincided with an effort to literally rebuild cities. French colonies in North Africa offer perhaps the starkest contrast.

Compare the "map" of the medina, the old city, around Tunis' Zaytouna Mosque here (I put "map" in quotes because if you switch over to satellite view it's very obvious that they haven't mapped even a fraction of the streets): https://www.google.com/maps/place/Zaytuna+Mosque/@36.7980002,10.1665169,15.45z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x12fd34754f0de50d:0xd6055eb2c24a4f31!8m2!3d36.7972866!4d10.1712416

With the straight lines and boulevards of the Ville Nouvelle just to the east: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ville+Nouvelle,+Tunis,+Tunisia/@36.7985695,10.1795346,15.96z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x12fd346dabe97b83:0x48ce5fe1065bc605!8m2!3d36.7970481!4d10.1829325

In practice, many places in the Middle East still do not have formal street names, or where they do they aren't used. Even in a sleek, ultra-modern part of Dubai my former street, with multiple high rise apartment blocks had no name, anything I delivered was in reference to a nearby hotel. In Abu Dhabi my address was "Off the old airport road [it has a new name but no one knows it as anything other than "the airport road"] behind the old fish market, above a local market."

It doesn't help that in many cases this has become a political exercise. So street names that were brought in by colonial administrators and named after old white colonialists are inevitably re-named for nationalist or other ideological political figures. In India, for example, this is very much a live political issue: https://www.ft.com/content/948fe3cc-6043-11e5-a28b-50226830d644

Without getting into 20 year stuff, many of the countries that I'm familiar with are still actively in the process of trying to regularize address systems. In a number of places the only solution for, say, businesses that need a guaranteed delivery address is to register a PO Box.

Sourcewise, Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt discusses this quite a bit.

Edit: this is a pretty good article explaining this process in Beirut: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jun/02/mapping-beirut-style-how-to-navigate-a-city-without-using-any-street-names