It could potentially have some benefit.
I had an iPad stolen from my office. I used Find My to play a sound, as the office had been ransacked and I wanted to see if it was somewhere in the piles of crap strewn about. Didn't hear it, didn't think about it. Turns out, a few miles away, two dudes got into a shouting match over whose idea it was to steal a trackable iPad and then they chucked it out the window. Cops recovered it from a ditch, because of course Find My showed the location.
Very near the ditch was a car that was stolen from the building parked in the driveway of the thieves. Real bright fellas. That would've been about 5 years ago, so they've got about 5 years left on their sentence then.
I'm not sure Apple has ever marketed these as theft recovery. More finding something you've lost or misplaced. I would imagine Apple's legal team is terrified of the first "My spouse decided to go after a stolen bicycle and got shot confronting the thieves" lawsuit.
I've noticed the same though. My wife and I put AirTags on our keys and the first time I drove my wife's car after we did that, I got a notification within a few minutes of pulling out of the driveway.