No. You have to enable location reporting for Google to track your location.
Yeah, everything asks for permissions now. To me, it's worth it for location history and being able to see real time traffic and stuff like in the article. I'll just turn it off when I go to visit my secret family in Canada.
It's true that it is enabled by default but if you go into the Privacy Check page of your Google account you can completely disable location history, android or not.
I'm not sure exactly how you mean enabled by default -- I think you are always prompted when setting up a new device, but the default position of the toggle is enabled.