Obviously there are systems that use BT proximity for various purposes (eg Tesla unlock, or various smart lock unlocking). But these all seem to be willing to operate with some slack, ie your Tesla doesn't really care if you are 10m away or 3m away when it detects that you are "close enough" to unlock.
I suspect you are doing the thing people often do where you wave away details by saying something is "in principle" doable, and ignoring the fact that going from "in principle" to actually working robustly, is most of engineering and sometimes very difficult and time consuming.
This is, however, partly the fault of the bluetooth SIG. My understanding is that the channel sounding feature requires additional (separated) antennas and for feature to sit in the chip outside the software stack for hardware-controlled latency, since it is attempting to do frequency offset and signal strength comparisons at different frequencies across the band, and not relying on just accurately timestamped responses. The directional features also require additional antenna. However, it is not made clear whether these are implemented as baseline or optional features. In reality, will they only be used for specialized hardware and as part of specialized deployments like commercial/industrial settings?
This is the org that will "standardize" an audio system which is only supported by a proprietary codec requiring commercial patent licensing.
"Find My" functionality also requires a lot more than just bluetooth, and so far every ecosystem has been proprietary/closed and patent-encumbered. Bluetooth isn't standardizing "Find My" functionality but instead marketing that these ecosystems "could" adopt channel sounding and directional features over time in new hardware. It appears that Samsung thinks this could be interesting, and the Chinese connected car consortiums (plural) are evaluating it as well.
BTW
802.11v is one of those elements that's part of the 802.11 bundle of specs, but somewhat optional as regards WiFi. Various elements of it are present (or not) in various chipsets. Fortunately the part Apple cares about for watch unlocking, the 802.11v timestamp, was present on the relevant chipsets used by Apple, though other elements of the spec are not.
Yes, these standards groups are a good place to create interoperable extensions, but they really shouldn't be creating extensions when there aren't sufficient member companies excited about implementing them.
Thank you for pointing out that this is a 802.11 feature and not a Bluetooth feature! I was not aware Apple was using 802.11v there.
802.11v and a few other specs are required to make WiFi roaming and mesh systems work optimally, but in the past were not considered relevant by the WiFi alliance, so roaming in the past was one of those things that often did not work well in terms of consumer interoperability. I'm not sure if this has "legally" changed in terms of the support demanded by WiFi 6 and WiFi 7, maybe so given how mesh's have now become so prominent?
The WiFi Alliance kinda does things right, because they have a proper firewall between the 802.11 specs (in IEEE) and the marketing of WiFi as a brand. There isn't motivation to say "WiFi 7 means that it could maybe support a subset of 802.11v because ooh neat features over there". The certification is instead about specific required features which are defined over on the IEEE side, and that predictability makes WiFi a reliable brand purchasing-wise
This is also the sort of separation that Intel has between Thunderbolt 5 and the USB-IF and USB4, perhaps a more ideal example because the USB-IF _does_ try to market USB as a certification and licensed brand itself, and has had decades of challenges in doing so.
Since this is an Apple forum, it is worth pointing out that sometime around when the first charging spec for USB-A deviated from iPod/iPhone/iPad charging and became part of certification, Apple has distanced themselves from the USB marketing brand and has (AFAIK) not gotten products USB certified. Today sell "Charging" cables with USB-C connectors but no real markings, as well as "Thunderbolt" cables - where the Thunderbolt cables are indeed properly certified and labelled.
A third "separated" example which has developed is AMD FreeSync, which mandates monitors have specific useful and marketable capabilities. Having a mark to shoot for has helped uptake on these features and consumer confidence that they will actually be able to use the hardware the way they expect. Having it be by a separate organization lets certification be for both HDMI and DisplayPort functionality.
