It's baffling how Apple on the one hand claims that user privacy is the most important thing to them, but on the other hand they built an anonymous tracking network that can be abused for many nefarious purposes, and everyone who has an iPhone was made a part of the network whether they like it or not.
There are so many things that are questionable about Airtags. Another way to abuse it would be for example, you could place an Airtag somewhere on an iPhone users driveway, and use it to determine when they arrive home by checking for pings. The victim won't even see a notification, since the Airtag is stationary.
Preventing attacks like this would require the victim to know where to opt-out of Apple's tracking network, a setting that Apple hid by giving it a confusing name ("Network & Wireless") and shows a warning that your phone won't work properly anymore if you try to turn it off.
(Also, turning that setting off presumably also turns off the Airtag warning? So you are trading one risk against another?)