It's a distinction without a meaningful difference. It's geo-locked because non-global rights exist, and non-global rights exist because geo-locking (implemented technically or not) is possible.
The context matters very little to the users who can’t access content, but it gets somewhat interesting when it comes to things like geo-locking. I can imagine a situation where User X can normally access content from their home country Y, but can’t access that same content on the same service when working abroad in country Z without using a VPN. The service detects they are using a VPN, but doesn’t care because the IP matches the county of the billing address of their payment method and thus complies with the content provider’s contractual obligations with respect to streaming rights. It’s frustrating when a different person using a VPN to that same country can’t access the content simply because their account is not in the same country as the VPN exit point.
But I agree with what you said, I just think it is an interesting topic and so the distinction matters to me more than it may to you.
Things like the above are infuriating to me as someone who appreciates the position content creators and licensees are in, I just don’t have much patience with the failure modes of copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_without_a_differen...