Yeah, it's definitely not entirely out of their hands. My reason for saying "essentially out of their hands": if their analysis shows that, say, they would almost certainly just be bleeding huge amounts of money by purchasing rights for regions where almost no one would ever watch it, I think it's hard to fault them for that decision.

I'm guessing it's not a matter of nickel-and-diming, but it just really being very unwise or totally infeasible to get global rights for everything. Of course, I'm just blindly speculating and I have no clue and maybe they really are being cheap in some way.

And I think it's quite possible the VPN stuff really is out of their hands. (From a policy perspective, not an implementation perspective. Obviously the implementation is entirely on them, and the false positive bans are their fault.)

From a business perspective, I would think they'd be incentivized to allow them and not dedicate resources to trying to block them. But lots of podcasts I watch have a bunch of ad segments for different VPNs, where the main selling point is typically "watch stuff for other regions on Netflix", and I'm guessing the companies they're licensing from are increasingly seeing this loophole as basically a form of piracy.