Climate change denial along with the idea of not needing public transit is more or a huge propaganda campaign. It is closer to an ad campaign put on by “big oil” than just idiots talking on the internet. Koch brothers are huge into this whole thing but in America at least it was a planned and targeted campaign.
Similar to why Subaru is known as a vehicle for lesbians, that was also an ad campaign before the internet.
It’s important I think to know this isn’t “hive mind” mentality or just a few idiots convincing others. This is a huge campaign with huge money backing it. Ads and propaganda science is a wild science and really interesting but just know with enough money, time, and skill, convincing a large group of people to do or think something is very possible and done every day.
GPS is entirely free. What cost money is relaying that information back to you. Since you are talking about GPS I am assuming you want something more than just a beacon style tag. You are looking for something you can insert your own data only SIM card into that you can program yourself to upload it’s coordinates to a website every X seconds or whatever you choose. You also want it to have BLE for the beacon style of the air tag. Self hosting this is not going to be cheap each device would be around $10 a month for the data only SIM.
I have no clue who sells these off the self. You can get an ESP32 with GPS and a SIM card slot. This is basically exactly what you are looking for but you still need to do the programming and manufacture a case depending on the application.
It’s a cool project hopefully with this info you can find an OTS version.