They are completely different.

It's like saying "we don't hire people in Alabama" and "we don't hire black people".

Are those two statements equivalent?

There very well may be real reasons not to hire people in Alabama, (I'm making these up).. Onerous regulations, taxes too high, etc. Not hiring a class of people because of what they are is very different.

The whole problem at Gitlab is that nobody could articulate a concrete reason to ban people who live in Russia whereas in China they wouldn't hire them because of the Great Firewall and the block of google whose services were important to job functions.

Changing your country of residence when you get a new job is perfectly normal. Changing your nationality is not.

I don't have the numbers of course, but I would imagine the number of remote gitlab employees who changed their country of resistence upon employment to be close to zero, so it's definitely not normal.

I work at Google and I know plenty of people who moved here from abroad for the job.

Gitlab is remote-only though so I doubt they see many job-related moves.