Wow you’re right. Find My has used 10% of my battery in the past day even though my iPad stays permanently at home. What’s worse is that my battery life has dropped from 100% health to 96% after a year even though I enabled the 80% charge limit. I wonder if Find My has added excessive wear on the battery.

Another solution is just to fully turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. (Not "disable new connections" but fully turn them off). I have a Shortcut on my iPad's homescreen that does this. Just keeping Bluetooh off definitely greatly improves idle battery life. And you can use Shortcut automations to automatically turn it back on when you take certain actions. And if you don't care about Find My at all, you can disable it deep in system settings.

This is all far from ideal.

Yep, same experience. It's crazy that the very much default case of "iPad and things with Air Tags" has this effect. Not exactly an edge case.

Disabling bluetooth usually helps there. But completely, not from the control center.