I don't think that's it, since this project has been in the works for years and has burnt way more resources than just keeping on-server location history in mai

I don't think that's it, since this project has been in the works for years and has burnt way more resources than just keeping on-server location history in maintenance mode ever would have. It seems to be motivated by actual privacy concerns with Google keeping an exhaustive history of users' precise and semantic locations on Google servers, in particular the increasing use of geofence warrants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-just-killed-geofence-warrants-police-location-data/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/14/google-...).