I disagree. Things may be different in the EU, but for every feature that triggered the "enable location history" popup, it made a lot of sense to require it. And, most importantly, you can just turn it off and everything important keeps working.

You can disable the "send a list of nearby cell towers to Google's live database" setting, the "send a list of Bluetooth beacons to Google's live database" setting, and the "send a list of WiFi networks to Google's live database" setting, all without losing location access. Your location access will become a lot slower, but that's just a consequence of having to rely on GPS again, like we did before all of these extra features became available.

Google is even making their location history feature worse because they don't like how many blanket location history requests they're receiving from authorities, by moving location history to be stored on-device.

For years Google lied about consent users supposedly gave for some types of location tracking, but after they got found out (and the authorities got involved) they changed their tune.

You're not alone.

Did the overhaul result in better end user privacy? If so it was worth it. Even if it just resulted in a higher cost to maintain the existing level of privacy violation it would be worth it from a customers perspective. The more it costs to surveil people the better from the consumer privacy perspective.