I remember when the 3DS was region locked (cartridges can only be read if the console is bought in the same country those games are from) meaning it’s a headache having to switch between two variants of the handheld (I had a Japanese 3DS XL and an American 3DS regular back then, alternating on each one depending on which game I wanted to play). The switch alleviated this by making the cartridges / console region free.
Annoying and potentially expensive. The thing about region locks is, sometimes games were market specific. So the game only had one or two region variants available at all. As a result, you’d have to buy a region specific system to play them. I also seem to recall the possibility of bricking a system or disk/cartridge when putting it in the wrong region system so there’s that. From a collection standpoint, if you only wanted to buy the systems and games and not play them, it was probably expensive but fine. Import fees and scarcity of special edition consoles may possibly have been extra pain points in the event that you had to have that region specific variant of a game or console.