I've seen huge battery life gains by enabling location services only when absolutely necessary. I can't make it through the day on a single charge if location services are enabled. I've seen the battery go from 85% to 15% in just a couple of hours. Example: enabling location services to get a Lyft to dinner, not looking at the phone again until it's time to go home, and seeing that the battery is almost dead. Disable location services and sometimes I find myself charging every other day.

I think the workaround you propose might have the same effect because you're killing apps that could be using location and network in the background. Not sure how it works these days for apps that can access your location at any time. Do they at least have to be "running" to do that?