You also have the situation where if air tags did not have the anti-stalking features, there would be far more stalkers in the world. I'm sure there's many people who would not buy a GPS logger and connected to someone's car, but they might "forget" an airtag in someone's car, were it not for the anti-stalking alerts.

I suspect if Apple went the Anti-Theft route, thieves would not stop thieving, they would just start searching large stolen items for air tags before bringing it to wherever they may.