My car was stolen a year ago. If it wasn’t for the iPhone app tracker I had I never would have gotten it back. Police didn’t have any way to track it.
Fortunately my car has a manual transmission, so chances are any idiot kid who tries to hop in my car and steal it will give up a few seconds after they realize that they have no idea how to operate it.
For many people, even though insurance is just supposed to "make you whole" they end up with a better result after a payout, even with a $500 deductible or whatever.
Often actual theft is deductible-free.
The difference is that here, the police refuse to help if it's not a life-threatening emergency. I had the position of some AirPod Pros with an AirTag attached, and I watched it commute to a house. The police here refused to do anything about it.
Another time, they refused to do anything about a stream of idiot tourists driving the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of them who couldn't get to anywhere, causing gridlock.
If you ever want your stolen property back here, you must get a weapon and collect it yourself.
The cops could absolutely track it. License plate readers are built into most cop cars and parking enforcement vehicles, they could call the carmaker, they could view cctv from the area, whatever. If it was something they actually cared about - like one of their cars, or a cop killer, or their promotion was riding on it - they'd track it down. It's just not worth the time for them to do it, probably because there's too many car thefts and not enough time given to them to look into them.
Maybe where you live that's true. Try going somewhere in upstate NY, or deep in West Virginia. The tracking technology is unevenly distributed.
Destined for a chop shop? Even if they do track it all they'd see is it leaving the city, never to be seen again.
... now, if the data were, say, aggregated somewhere with low friction to police access...