Other than that, the article is one of the most clickbaity one I've read
I used google maps as a sort of address book starring the homes of friends, family, work locations, interesting places, etc. One day I turned off all the tracking and location history crap and had zero issues. Then one day I couldn't see any of my saved locations. What? I did some research and found out that a recent update now requires you to enable location history. WTF! Their brain damaged logic is the location you saved was done in the past so it stands to reason that it's part of history! Of course that's not really the reason, the reason is to force people to turn location history back on.
Bullet, meet foot.
Can always try to look for ways around first. Invidition (Firefox plugin to make use of Invidious automatically when seeing Youtube links) worked ok-ish for a while for me, lately less so.