It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't

It's a purposeful choice to avoid interfering with radio bandwidth allocations to existing geostationary satellites. As I understand it, Starlink dishes aren't allowed to send signals to a portion of the sky around the equator where the geostationary satellites are located. Starlink would probably work even better if they didn't have to deal with this restriction, but Starlink might not have been allowed to exist if they didn't design it to work this way.