What’s the benefit in knowing for the general public where a car is registered at (Germany, Austria, etc.) or when it was registered (UK)?
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This is not primarily to give a benefit to everyone seeing the plate, but to make it easier to issue them.
Remember that these systems go back to before everything was done with computers networked to each other.
How would you ensure that the license plates are unique across the country? It is relatively easy for each district to ensure that they don’t hand out the same number twice, but to coordinate that across the country in the days before the Internet was difficult.
The solution is to simply have each district hand out plate numbers from different pools.
In Germany for example the license plates start with a 1-3 Letter code that stands for the town or district they are issued in.
This makes administering the plates much easier.
The fact that people can easily tell if a car is likely local or not, is just an incidental benefit.
Cities at this point have taken up their license plate codes as part of their identity and you frequently see those codes used as a shorthand for places nowadays, but that was never the main reason.
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