They have a search bar at the top where you can type "Find my" and it jumps you straight to those sections.
The only jump that is not immediately obvious is that the Find My settings are under your Apple ID settings. Everything else is blindingly obvious and is not confusing at all. You being confused does not mean the average person will also be confused. You could just be a confused person.
From there though, it is a root level option when setting up your phone and enabling "Find My iPhone".
I'm actually disappointed that the disabling of the network is even an option.
Bit of a tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people like you who want the benefits of being able to find their own phone when it's lost but not participate in helping find other people's.
What if you only want to turn off airtags? This false choice is caused by apple.
Furthermore, when you disable the find my network it disables it for you as well. You can't just do it one way so it's not selfish.
> tragedy of the commons situation if we have too many selfish people
I can’t think of how helping the Find My network would compromise my privacy in any significant way. But I am still glad there’s an option to disable, there may be people for whom it is a concern.
Eh, I find it a stretch to consider things that need to be typed "discoverable" unless there's a user manual provided telling you everything that can be typed. This same reasoning is why many would consider GUIs (or text mode menu-driven interfaces) to be more user-friendly than CLIs.
Voice assistants have a very similar issue, but nobody likes IVR systems either, so who knows.
There’s nothing on any of the apple pages I could find about opting out.
If it took me that long to disable it, it won’t be obvious for most people.
I found it through Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services -> Share my Location -> Find my iPhone -> Find my Network.
They could have put it 2 steps above or found a better way.