Where true, I think that counts as "missing the point".

Local foods are, as I understand it, supposed to be some combination of more eco-friendly and supporting local farmers.

Growing a potato in your kitchen cupboard using hydroponics and PV+LED is very local, but you'd have to grow a lot of them before you saved more on transport and processing emissions than created by the equipment; and you certainly aren't helping local farmers by doing it yourself.

Local is purely about quality for me. I can get food that’s riper fresher and tastier if it doesn’t have to travel.

You're probably in group 2.

Why do you support local farmers? Like on a deep level? Deeper than "well they're my neighbors" Why do you support your neighbor over some guy in Nebraska? Probably because his culture an interests align with yours whereas the same is not necessarily true about the guy thousands of miles away and all the parties between you and him. You'd rather be slightly less dependent on the long supply chain than the short one.

Local foods are necessarily more ripe and fresher than remotely grown foods. There are more reasons than supporting your neighbors or stable food chains - quality is almost universally higher at a farmers market than at a big box store. That’s not because local farmers are superior, it’s because they harvest closer to optimal ripeness and sell it fast before it spoils. Food grown on the other side of the planet and shipped in storage containers is necessarily harvested very early and is non optimally ripened, or never ripens.