Yeah, just many people who don't know what they are talking about confusing WHOIS vs a trace route. I'll try to explain it in simple terms.

WHOIS is like the internet phonebook "white pages". Like when you buy a .com name, you have the choice to publish who administers and pays for that domain. The address information is published for anyone to see. This has no bearing where the server(s) for that domain lives. You can protect your assets by just putting a corporate address of your company as the white listing. But your server might actually be in another country.

Traceroute is basically sending a heartbeat from your PC and internet connection to see the actual pipelines it has to go through to get the end connection. This method reports every pipeline hop you have to go through including the end of the tunnel. This is how you actually discover the server(s) you end at because internet backbones and data centers generally use some city codes as part of their pipeline addresses because they have a lot of them.