The startup I work for hasn't ever had issues with any of the things you mentioned. What line of business is this, do you sell weapons to Ukraine or some such?
> absolutely first thing I do at every company and on every project is ask if I can [block various countries]
For side projects?! Blows my mind. This feels like the 2020s version of what used to be in chain emails "don't pick up this phone number or they'll eat your dog". People believe it because it works. They don't pick up the number and their dog wasn't eaten. Doesn't harm them, only the person who owns the number. Better be safe. Use ddos protection (it's free!) and centralize the world's traffic for your hobby website, don't trust your ISP that has a known profit model but rather pay for an additional VPN that promises not to work with law enforcement because that's obviously not shady, similar for using DoH from cloudflare (thanks mozilla for making that the default), etc. The Internet is becoming such a weird place.
I get annoyed when people block Tor, but at least that's somewhat understandable as there is no concept of abuse email addresses to reach out to. Blocking not just ISPs that don't play nice, but an entire country? Multiple? As the first thing you do, before a problem exists? In-sane.