It always was this easy. Apple has't made it easier because it has built-in anti-stalking which you cannot disable. You can tamper with the speaker, but not wit

It always was this easy. Apple has't made it easier because it has built-in anti-stalking which you cannot disable. You can tamper with the speaker, but not with the BTLE or UWB radios (well, you technically can but at that point you can't use them to track anything either). The only thing you could theoretically attribute to Apple is that it is now much more known that this can happen. That is both good (you can now look for it) and bad (dumb people will try to use this to stalk/steal, not realising that they are tied to their AppleID, and thus to their SIM, IMEI, MAC, and device serial number and thus to them).