I guess you have the transit map, and all the schedules, memorized? Because for most people, getting to an unfamiliar location at a specific time by public transit alone is quite a project. And then if you "meander half a mile", does the bus change its route to come get you?

Bring up your phone assitant and say "I want to take public transport to the meat packning district" and it will probbly work. My seven year old did it, and paid, on her own.

GTFS is published by most public transport these days, so you have all the routes described months ahead of time. You can actually have all the schedules offline.

There's an app, but I also live in a pretty small city so I know all the routes to where I live. If I'm drifting to another part of town and will be "close enough" to a rail or bus line, certainly easier than retracing my steps back to some pinned location. And of course if I'm feeling very lazy there are taxis, which are extremely cheap compared to owning a car, and they will come get me if I want, but there are so many of them I'm better off grabbing one off the street.

To be fair, same applies to parking. Finding a parking lot in an unfamiliar location in a dense city can be quite a challenge.

The majority of people use navigation even when driving to a familiar location so they can be routed around other traffic and disruptions (which are by no means infrequent).

Similarly, I'll check the route home on Google Maps to decide not only which route to take but which mode (walking, transit, shared vehicle, etc) to use.

You just take a car-sharing car back to your car.

If there's no car-sharing car nearby, you can take an e-scooter to the car-sharing car, and then go to your car.

Why not just take it step further and take it home?