I am very privacy focused and I do like this feature. I like it so much that I've cobbled together a bunch of tools to do essentially the same thing without relying on Google. I have a program on my phone that is always running and capturing my location and saving it to gpx files in a specific folder. That folder is synced to my desktop (directly over SyncThing), and I can evaluate the files easily with Python to see where I've been at any given time. I usually don't do anything with the gpx files, but there have been situations where I needed to know how long I was in a particular place over a longer period of time (for work) where it was incredibly useful to have the data.

One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet).

I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.