Not saying it should be mandatory.
That would be a bad thing for me especially bc my main acct is USA based but because I also work overseas I need to use the local App Store because many useful and critical local apps are not available in the USA store (so I have 2 different AppleID’s one tied to each store).
(I can imagine that the biggest hiccough here is intellectual property in the App, iTunes, Bookstore, etc., where rights holders protections and royalties vary across the world. But if a person could merge the free stuff, they might be willing to rebuy some of the paid stuff along the way to purging an unwanted account ((simplification is not always free)) should the IP terms for regions be different - but I think cross regional merger is likely to be a relative edge case).
But I know several people that in the early days of iPhone ownership, partly due to the lack of cloud backup, lost their first account when phone was lost, stolen, etc. they then set up a new account and then somehow recovered the first account and have at least two accounts running in parallel when they only need one.
The potential for Apple ID proliferation is mitigated by a number of things nowadays but still happens.
This is why an option for those to reduce a messy footprint via merger as opposed to abandonment or transcription would be nice for some (many of the necessary tools are built in like searching contacts for duplicates, or file syncing in iCloud and notes, etc).
(Allowing merger would also be an iCloud storage upsell opportunity for Apple.)
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