> "Does it leave money on the table? Genuine question..."

Yes it does, 100%.

Once you've got content that people in multiple countries want to watch, you've broadly got two options: let everyone watch on the same terms, or split it up by region. Even Netflix chooses the latter - each country that Netflix has customers in has a different price for subscribing. (They also have different libraries of media that can be watched, but that's mainly as a result of the companies they license it from doing different deals for different countries, as far as I know Netflix do release their own content in all regions at the same time.)

This is because if you don't price it differently, you either price it for countries like the US, and make it unaffordable - or too expensive to be worth paying for, at least - for much of the world, or you price it more cheaply and leave money on the table from Americans (and other rich countries) who would've been willing to pay more.

If the media industry hadn't existed before the internet then probably all companies would look more like Netflix and the other streaming companies, and it would be simple for all content to be licensed globally to the same streaming platform. But because both historically and still today we have broadcast companies which are country specific, any time they get involved (which is pretty much every time with the exception of content made by the steaming companies themselves), you now not only have custom pricing per country but also custom where-can-you-watch per country. And while this can be annoying, it ultimately leads to the content owners earning more than if they didn't do specific deals with specific broadcasters and instead sold a single package to a single streaming company.

> "Would traditional media have been able to produce Squid Games?"

I'm not sure what aspect of it you think required Netflix, but for decades media companies have been producing things with more than a single country in mind - whether that's BBC's Top Gear being syndicated to a huge number of countries, or Friends being dubbed in French, or whatever. I don't see any reason that a BBC or Apple or whoever else couldn't have done it, the only difference is that BBC doesn't have a global distribution platform like Netflix does, so BBC would have had to do deals with broadcasters (or streaming companies) for any country they want viewers in other than the UK.

Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions