The audible tone can interfere with other stalking-adjacent use cases - for instance use for pet tags, for tracking children's backpacks, and so on.

It actually doesn't help as much for anti-theft, because a thief still might be smart enough at this point to check their phone for AirTag notifications. The audible tone may not even hit in a theft instance.

Probably 2-3 people. From a random search online it looks like the company has about a dozen employees.

Ah okay yeah that makes sense

Was missing the “make it more difficult for a thief to find the AirTag and remove it” part.

Cheers!