[jlesk]

Strangely enough, many countries also have cultural laws around what languages can be used for subtitles and audio tracks. For example, IIRC there is a country in SA that doesn't allow non-Spanish subtitles if the primary audio is in Spanish.

There are all kinds of permutations like that which can look like arbitrarily bad UI decisions if you don't know the greater context.

[setr]

They're still pretty poor UI decisions if you're implementing misfeatures for every country based on the limitations of some countries. The more harmful it is, and the more money you have, the less justifiable it is.

I'm fairly positive, at the scale of Netflix, and the relatively minor amount of UI work they need to do, they aren't struggling to implement country-specific features. More likely than not, the ball either got dropped, or the misfeature wasn't understood as one.