All those articles seem to say if you leave App Tracking on, and use Google Maps, yes, Google will save your location. Someone who is anti-Google shouldn't be leaving any tracking on, and shouldn't be using Google's Apps.

If you have any evidence that someone who uses Android without a Google account and doesnt use Google Apps is still getting tracked by Google, I'd be interested to see it.

Apple also tracks your GPS trace just like Google Maps does, the difference is they don't seem to share it with you.

Apple Maps employees use these "anonymized" GPS traces to correct roads, show business hours, find new points of interest that are unmapped, etc

They don’t share it with you because they can’t. It’s anonymized.

The GPS trace is not practically anonymized, comparison with public and semipublic datasets would deanonymize a large portion of the GPS traces.