My experience using a Canon SX730HS for four years

Thank you for the detailed reply. I'll probably come back to read bits of this later.

This comment is just to clarify one part:

GPS lags. Many cameras with built-in GPS take time to lock in your position — just like the lag you experienced with using the phone connection. I get that you want GPS if you are hiking for hours over many trails and covering a wide distance…

I think you misunderstood the problem I described. GPS "lag" often means that a camera may have the GPS position where you were a few minutes ago, and takes time to "catch up" and update to the new position. I experience this with my Olympus Tough cameras, which all have built-in GPS, and which do sometimes lag (I can greatly reduce this lag by remembering to install a recent GPS data update). But that's not the issue I'm talking about with the Canon and its dependence on an app for GPS.

The problem isn't that its GPS "lags", the problem is that I need to actually stand there with the camera in one hand and the phone in the other, app open, and _wait_ until they connect. Or until they don't connect, in which case I can try again by killing the app and restart it. Maybe there's a bird that I want to take a picture of, and instead I'm just standing there waiting and looking at my phone. Or, what I sometimes do instead, is take a few pictures, then pull out the phone and wait for it to connect and take a picture of the ground or something. Later, when I have the photos on my computer, I need to find groups of photos like that and use exiftool to get the GPS data from the extra picture to copy it into the pictures I actually wanted to take. Either way, it's a frustrating, tedious, error-prone process.

Also, the problem I'm talking about is that it's up to me, and my own manual action. I'm responsible for checking if the camera has dropped its GPS, and pulling my phone out to run the app and restore it. It's not "lagging", it's disconnected, and if I don't notice or don't do anything about it, it will likely never reconnect.

GPS lag is a minor annoyance. It does not compare to this, this is a totally different league of problem, and much more serious.

do you need the precise location? Are there alternatives such as taking a photo of trail signs, recording a brief video with voice memo? It seems that having GPS is a biggie for you.

Of course there are "alternatives", but they are all even worse than using the app and reconnecting to the camera.  All of these alternatives require me to think about it and take manual actions to record my locations, _and_ to then spend a lot of time on the computer later to reconstruct those locations and get approximate coordinates into the image files.

I've actually done that plenty of times, for groups of photos where the camera did disconnect from the app and I didn't notice or didn't have time to spend to reconnect, and I ended up with a bunch of photos without GPS data.  After the fact, I can reconstruct their approximate locations from things like trail signs, landmarks, and my memory, and I can get GPS coordinates from Google Maps and use exiftool to put them into the photo files.  But that's much harder and much more work and less accurate than just having the camera connect to the app, so I try to keep the camera connected to the app as much as possible.  But just because that's a lot better than relying on these inefficient "alternatives" doesn't mean it doesn't still suck.

What wouldn't suck is if the camera had its own built-in GPS.  Even with lag, it would still do it all mostly on its own.  I would not need to think about it all the time, nor would I need to keep pulling out and unlocking my phone and staring at an app.  Sure, I'd get some GPS-lagged photos, but that's a LOT better than what I get with this camera.
And again, it's quite unbelievable to me that this camera doesn't have GPS.  It really surprised me, after I got the camera, to find out that I'd need to rely on a phone app.