I was experiencing the exact same thing on an early 2015 MBP w/ Catalina. It was extremely aggravating as the 2.4GHz radio seems dead and 5GHz wasn't working well due to location relative to AP. Timestamping ping and running "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport logger" showed that there was dependence on ping spikes (~1.5ms jumping up to ~200ms) to the local gateway with this airportd autojoin message, "Wed Jan 27 10:53:47: AutoJoin: <airportd[219]> Successful cache-assisted scan request for locationd" The MBP was constantly scanning, and without a decent WiFi connection, networking would ultimately fail. The ping spikes were also dependent on the "kernel_task" process running, which probably means that networking was blocked in the kernel during the time airportd was doing a scan for locationd. So, observing that all this was dependent and locationd had way more CPU time then one would imagine, it quickly led to the "Find My Mac" feature. Turning this off quieted locationd and the MBP completely stopped doing a WiFi scans. Hopefully this helps others.