My $0.02 on the Beacon feature. The Google maps app has “location sharing” where you can share to others your real-time location. Perhaps the one difference is that you have to manually start it?
When I had Strava Premium, I found the Beacon to be a bit inconsistent anyways - it would often fail to start automatically via my GPS, so I’d end up checking both things, and usually running Google Maps location sharing anyways.