We should stop creating geographic hierarchies in descriptive metadata period.
Geographic hierarchy can be a maintenance burden and difficult to update over time. It falls short in a lot of areas and doesn't really give us what we need for discovery.
Capture the most granular geographies within the metadata, no need to list the entire tree.
** Example ** from https://github.com/OpenGeoMetadata/edu.stanford.purl/blob/master/bc/899/yk/4538/mods.xml