I mean, it's a search engine. If you type in the name of a restaurant, you want to get the one in your area, not the one halfway around the globe. If you type the name of a store, you want to get their website for your country, not another continent.
You don't want Google to know your location down to a resolution of meters, that makes sense. But it makes a lot of sense for a search engine to try to figure out your city and country from your IP address, at least.
It's not pure search, though. I frequently want results specific to my queries, not based on context or details they assume about me. Searches are also effectively censored by common internal policy to return "local" same-language results to the historical profile they've assigned to your session. It's very hard to escape.
If I try to search in another language for news or information local to another part of the world from an associated device or while logged into Google services, I also get mostly US or English results. I can't just explore the Chinese web, or the non-commercial web, or whatever it is I'm actually looking for, just whatever they want their idea of what they want me to see.
A related peeve, but if I'm planning a trip and want to know where certain stops, like Costcos, are in a state, in Maps, I can't zoom to the level of the state and then "search this area" without it returning a very incomplete list mixed with pins for related results, often unlabeled until clicked on. I have to know or guess where a business might have a location, zoom in, and search repeatedly to be sure. Generic queries like "south indian restaurants" are even more limited.
This is especially frustrating when I know there's a location that isn't showing so I can't set a detour, or if I'm physically nearby something that's not being shown in relevant results, for whatever reason. Our locations aren't always especially useful to us, but having that data is apparently creating some value for them.
I mean, it's a search engine. If you type in the name of a restaurant, you want to get the one in your area, not the one halfway around the globe. If you type the name of a store, you want to get their website for your country, not another continent.
You don't want Google to know your location down to a resolution of meters, that makes sense. But it makes a lot of sense for a search engine to try to figure out your city and country from your IP address, at least.