Is Blu-ray region restriction still active?

[NotSure70]

I only have one region B Blu-ray, because I always made sure to buy region A. I never had the need to buy anything region B, but at one point about a year or two ago, the only way to get the Legion season 1 Blu-ray set was to get the region B on Amazon. As expected, this didn't play in any of my 4K Blu-ray players.

Yesterday I came across a video on YouTube showing that there was a "hack" to play region B Blu-rays on the Panasonic UB820 and the UB9000, that didn't involve installing a hacked firmware from an USB drive (which I would never do), but by pressing stop and then top menu several times.

So I put in the first disc of Legion, and to my surprise, it just went straight to the main menu. I clicked to start playing the episode, and it started playing just fine. Then I put the second disc (the whole set is just two) and it also played fine without any pressing stop and top menu.

I wanted to make sure that the set was region B, and indeed, in the back it shows the B inside the hexagon. Each disc also has the hexagon printed on it.

This is a player I bought straight from Amazon, it was the Amazon listing, not a third party seller, and it came in a factory sealed box, so this is definitely not a multiregion unit.

So I wanted to test this further and put the first disc in my Sony X700. To my surprise, it played just as fine. Finally, I put it in my Oppo UDP-203, which has been discontinued and hasn't had a firmware update in years. Well, to my surprise, it also played fine with it.

Just as the Panasonic, the Sony and the Oppo were not bought as multiregion players, and I definitely didn't install any firmware that wasn't the ones available from the player itself in the settings.

So this obviously puzzles me, because I remember trying to play these discs on these three players and not getting anywhere. But now they play just on all three, not pressing any special combination of buttons.

So does anyone what's the story here? My confusion comes from this: if they decided recently to finally end the ridiculous region restrictions, and they deployed that with a firmware update, why can my Oppo play these two discs, when it hasn't gotten a firmware update in years? I'm sure that I bought this Legion set way after the last Oppo update.

At the same time, if the region restriction was ended, it was only done for Blu-rays, because the only other European disc I have is a DVD, and that one won't play in any of the three players. Even in the Panasonic, doing the stop and pressing top menu 7 times, it keeps telling me that it can't play because of the region.

So I'm very confused. Maybe this set says it's region B but they forgot to write the region metadata? Unfortunately I don't have any other region B Blu-rays to test that.