I heard that in USSR the policy for apendectomy was that adults got only local anesthesia and kids would get general. No idea if that was the official policy or rumors only. I had appendectomy when I was 12 (that was USSR times) and got general anesthesia.
most probably it was some kind of officially established policy/practice. My mother got the appendectomy when she was an adult, and i got the nose job when i was almost 16, while the hernia surgery that i had at 5 was naturally under general.
reverse situation - all the memory and no pain. I had a surgery on my nose done under local, and it was kind of unreal experience when the surgeon stopped cutting and took what looked like a typical woodworking chisel and a small hammer and started to chisel away the bone in my nose - all without any pain, my head is just like a piece of wood - the force would transfer and the back of my head would feel the pressure every time the hammer would fall and the scraping vibrations of the chiseling would just reverberate through the scull. ... More than 20 years later ENT here was genuinely curious where did i get such a nice job done. USSR military surgeon :) And back in the USSR my mother had her appendix removed under local too, and the surgeon was communicating to her various stages of the surgery, like what he is going to do and how that may be felt/perceived.
I wonder about the merits of those different approaches. (very handwavy as IANAD) With the local the pain doesn't seem to reach the central nervous system. With the sedation or general it reaches i suppose, yet the central nervous system has no reaction. If one supposes that the strong pain may be a kind of neuron pathway/connection altering signal ("EEPROM burning"), it would be plausible to expect that that unfelt or felt-and-forgotten at the time pain under sedation or general may still have some effects down the road.