Someone had their rental car broken into, and their stuff stolen. He had a Tile on his keys, and noticed that he got a ping outside of SLU in Seattle, so he posted in the /r/seattle subreddit.
I happened to be working there at the time, so I messaged him and went for a walk. It took me about 30 min to find his keys (his bag was gone, they must have dumped it elsewhere) in a bush, which I was able to mail back to him.
So, I bought a couple Tiles since that was proof to me that it worked.
But, looking back, over the day or so it was there, he only got two pings to my recollection: one person that walked by (and caused him to post to Reddit), and me once I found it. AirTag's network is just so much bigger. I'm pretty convinced you would get at most a single ping if you mailed a Tile somewhere.
I also use a Tile in my snowboard bag. I was always able to confirm the bag made it on the plane because my phone would connect through the floor of the plane into the cargo hold, but I'd be very lucky if I got a ping when the bag was in the baggage belt system underneath the airport.
Tile was a great idea and worked well if you had other Tile users nearby. It's not really their fault the network is so small, it's a hard problem to solve to seed that network unless you happen to own a billion devices...