My understanding of structured keyword hierarchy is that is getting all the keywords in the hierarchy is WHY you use them in the first place. If you don't want all the keywords in the hierarchy, then consider using a flat keyword list.
In your case, I have a couple suggestions.
1. Putting "Location" as the top level keyword of your hierarchy is indeed adding "Location" as a keyword. It may be helpful for your own organization, but rest assured that Lightroom is treating it as an actual keyword.
2. If you double click on a keyword in the Keyword List in Lightroom Classic, you do have the option to uncheck "Export Containing Keywords" for individual keywords. I don't know about a batch level setting for this.
My advice (free to ignore :-) would be to clean up your keyword hierarchy in Lightroom to omit the labels, and then continue to apply the full hierarchy since that is the whole point. At some point you may want to find all pics in "North America" and at that point you will be glad it was included in the keyword list.
-Mick