ATC in other countries do little, if any, monitoring of the readback. Can't assume that. Additionally, the U.S. phraseology is different than the rest of the World, which complicates things further. Finally, you forget that ATC's job is just to separate traffic -- NOT to keep you out of the terrain. ATC probably didn't care what they did in that regard, direct or via the routing, didn't matter, what mattered was other traffic. Odds are they had gotten away with it in the past.
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