[Stockland Hillman]

It's become a weird British quirk where things must be matching,  I can think of no other country  where regional TV is cloned in every area - music,  gfx, titles yes but whole sets? Can't recall any

Not really. As a matter of fact, it’s become quite the norm to have matching sets in most if not all regions. Here are some examples I can think of: France 3 regional news, Rai 3 TG Regione in Italy, WDR Lokalzeit in Germany, SVT Lokala Nyheter in Sweden, ORF 2 regional news in Austria. All have the same look and set in multiple locations.

One notable exception being TVP3 in Poland, which is an outright explosion of wildly different regional styles under one channel brand.

Have a browse here: youtube.com 

I love tevebits 

Even in the examples you give, it matches my point.  Branding is shared and sets fit a vibe, while some identical, WDR, ORF and SVT all have variations in some regions (some are pre recorded shared production so are obviously identical, a bit like ITV meridian x3)

And oh Poland.  That is a very mixed bag.

Back to BBC Channel Islands and the tevebits trip made me think of NRK that has many tiny setups in the districts; Usually just a few PTZ cameras in a 'set' in a tiny corner of a newsroom with a production gallery sharing the space without walls! You can see it on the short late night bulletins at end credit shot in many districts.  Definitely on par with CI for compact operation, but onscreen a better tech quality

tv.nrk.no