Thank you! And yes, I guess once we're familiar with a place, a lot of this stuff comes more instinctively - when we're writing a place explicitly for other characters to pass through, it can be easier to just think about what functions they immediately appear to need, which is fine as a starting point but reduces what you can do with the results, I think.
Also that is another book I have not read and apparently should do. But the strangeness thing is a good point - inherently, things that bind a particular community together also start defining that community as having boundaries, even if it's only the boundary of "we have this body of shared experience we can discuss and you don't". I feel like not enough settings lean into the fact that travelling, or heroic, characters actually definitionally often end up in places where they're excluded from that communal body of experience: they may be allowed to observe it in a rather "this is the quaint culture of the locality/this is the Ignorant Superstition that I'm Better Than" sort of way (which has, to say the least, its own problems), or they may be explicitly invited in or shut out to show a place's reaction to a character, but I think there's a lot you can do with the subtler cultural mechanics of protagonists as just being somewhat outside the rhythm and cultural flows of a place.
There's also maybe a lot you can do with having protagonists who are inside that system, or very used to a place: the overwhelmingly predominant system in adventure fiction is to have the heroes being mobile, and for good reason, but actually there are some great traditional tales that rely on protagonists being quite tied to areas and knowing them well (think Robin Hood, Hereward the Wake, etc). I think that "hero with a geographical situation and tons of local cultural ties" rather than "hero with no ties who is loose to roam" is something that maybe isn't done enough, though maybe I'm just not sufficiently well read to know who's done it well.