I agree that it uses a little more battery than when you have it completely turned off. But the 1 to 2 hours extra battery life isn’t worth it for me to completely turn it off.
I use geocaching a lot, especially now when I’m on vacation, abroad, I use it to check in on Swarm what places I have been.
Since I’m on vacation in Istanbul, I don’t have wifi in my house (I only stay here for a maximum of 2 weeks, so it’s not worth it to get it for my house).
I have been using solely LTE for the past week and will do so for the coming week. Only at places that I trust I use WiFi, to download big app updates or playlists to Music.
It would have been too much steps for me to enable disable the wifi radio each time I want to use it.
Instead, I only swipe up Control Center to disable that one or 2 wifi spots my phone connects to because I had previously connected to it.
Imagine that I have to disable it, then enable it again to use better geo location the disable then enable and so on and so.
The way it works in iOS 11 is much more convenient in my use case.
It’s not like I don’t care how others feel, on the contrary, but these decisions are not made lightly by Apple. They have focus groups and such.
If, by any chance, Apple feels their decision is wrong, they’ll hopefully revert it back to the old way in a future update.
Until then there is not much we can do than to submit feedback to Apple through
https://www.apple.com/feedback/#mn_p.