This is one of the most infuriating things about traveling internationally. Sites that probably know more about me than I know about myself assume that I am a native of wherever I happen to be at the moment and make it difficult-to-impossible to alter that site behavior.
If I was a completely anonymous user coming in from a location it would be an understandable. But I'm not anonymous, I am logged in to the same account I've been using for a decade that in almost every other use case was US-ian English. So there really isn't any excuse. Absent any active attempt to change settings on my part, that I prefer US-ian centric settings is an easy inference to make even when I travel.
I want to believe there is a rationale for doing things this way but I can't think of one. All it does is make the Internet barely usable when I travel to many countries.
All of which is a case for delineating language content by TLD. It's easy enough, with fewer dialect subdirs than the monolithic techniques often employed by sites, but IME TLDs just offer a default with all the complications you describe carried from region to region.
But hey, Google's always been this way. Before you could even log in they used to have a "Settings" pane where you cuold set your language to be saved in a cookie. It would get lost all the time; you'd always have to reset it.
If I was a completely anonymous user coming in from a location it would be an understandable. But I'm not anonymous, I am logged in to the same account I've been using for a decade that in almost every other use case was US-ian English. So there really isn't any excuse. Absent any active attempt to change settings on my part, that I prefer US-ian centric settings is an easy inference to make even when I travel.
I want to believe there is a rationale for doing things this way but I can't think of one. All it does is make the Internet barely usable when I travel to many countries.