If you've run a site like that, pretty soon you realize 100% of the traffic that hits you from Asia, Russia, the Middle East and even Eastern Europe / the Baltics is exploit detection scripts and is just noise in your logs. Okay, 99.999999% as once every decade something ends up on HN and gets a broader audience.
What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible? What about locals who travel? What about locals who share links with others?
>What's the point of publishing news or content on the web if you don't want it to be accessible
Because you don't want the burden of far away users who will never represent a penny of income for your content? This is a weirdly entitled comment.
Quite aside from certain countries disproportionately account for malicious traffic, often there are legal issues that come into play as well. This is why many regional sites block EU locations because they don't want the compliance costs for users that aren't their base.