Pulling complete place/area via API

[InvisibleMan78]

Is this currently the only way to get the complete place area information:

Retrieving country name from city areas using API

I think the only way to do this is to filter the results you get from your inc=area-rels query, find the one (or more) that’s “part of” with <direction>backward</direction> query that area and check its area-type if the type is “country”, you’re done if the type is not a “country”, then repeat recursively until you find the country.

I thought there had been a change recently in the MB server API or am I wrong?