Can’t help with the gps, never used one

I forgot to mention, I have a minimum 1500k resistor in series on this ground wire to esp32

Just a very quick observation..you have no shared ground wire from sim to esp. I use a bread board and put battery ground onto a rail, then have ground wire from rail to sim and a ground wire from rail to esp, you need this for signal reference

I have exactly same situation with esp32 wroom dev 38 board. 10ma deepsleep. Not made any effort yet to improve, but will. However I also have a esp32 ’sparkfun Thing’ which is specially designed to have jumpers cut on the back of the pcb . Deep sleep is less than 50ua ( no typo) repeat 50 ua . Amaz...