izacus parent
That was never true. It was annoyingly aggresive, had some annoying UI limitations (e.g. it wouldn't remember past trips) but it was never fully unable to function.
You couldn't even save locations (such as a "home" or "work" location) without allowing google to track your location history.
I recall it being true on my 2014-era phones (can't recall if it was a Moto G or a Pixel). I wrestled with turning Location Services on and off every time I wanted to navigate until I eventually gave up and left it on permanently. Opening the app with Location Services off would produce an (as far as I knew) undissmissable prompt demanding that Location Services be turned back on. Perhaps there was some way to work around this, but it's clear what message they were trying to send.
Don't mix Location Services and Location History (confusing but similarly named things - Google at it's best :P).
Location Services provide... location. Without it, Maps obviously won't work. Location History sends your location to Google servers and you should probably turn it off.
I would say only giving the first voice direction when using maps to find a location is not working. I was using maps to find a place the GPS-map in my car didn't find, maps told which direction to start, but after starting to drive it did pop up a message that location history had to be turned on to get more directions
It still only shows "home" and "work" addresses in one obscure part of the UI with history off, while the rest of the UI won't let you change or add saved addresses without turning history back on.
This is a false requirement. Google doesn't need to track my real-time location to allow me to tell it the location of my home or work.
It's due to a technical detail. Because of how the software was built, turning on Home/Work would have led to the data being slurped into the servers as a side effect of the overall architecture, so they had to block the Home/Work in no-History feature until they fix the data flow. Up to you to judge why they didn't prioritize fixing that bug earlier.