I think it's less a calculated act of hostile design and more of a Hanlon's Razor moment; a manager says "It's working so it's good enough. We won't work on that because it's not a priority right now." I don't think the companies have enough time and energy to purposefully implement dark patterns.
Maybe put some pages explaining when you would need this functionality, that you have to be living in this country, etc. Or you could also limit the amount of times a user does it for maximum once in a month or less. And so on.
There's a lot of good alternatives, having bad UX should never be one of them.
Otherwise your users are just going to solve it their way, like in my case, where I had to create another account and backup all my stuff from the old account simply because I moved from my country.
The reason I suggested it as a possibility is that I see UX these patterns in other Apple products.
For example, the iOS Camera app hides away options for the frame rate and resolution of video under several menus. This option is much more accessible in actual cameras. In Apple's case, it's put out of easy reach to prevent the user from obsessing over which resolution to capture a moment, and to provide a uniform appearance to all captured content.
Options are hidden away to reinforce a set-it-and-forget mentality.