Google itself today tries to get you to back up everything online to be used across its ecosystem. If I choose to pause my "Web and app activity" - https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1 after which my activity stops getting backed up online, Google also stops storing any sort of history on local device - across all google apps - either allow everything or zero history. No local caching, not even my last search shows up in maps.

Will be interested to see if this behavior changes.