There is a specific option to let them do that. It's accessible both from your phone and web browser. It appears on the very first page of it, that you linked to, at the bottom, "pause location history", in a big box the same size as the other major points, it's even listed before the list of your known "common locations" such as home and work.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be opt in rather than opt out, it should, but that's still a far way away from hiding it from the user.
PS: I'm a very big user of permanent location history and it's a feature I enjoy, I would actually like to make it more granular / precise with more regular updating of my position if possible.
I see way more locations and rides than I actually navigated to with Maps. For most of the time, it is just installed.
I now manually disable all location services.