Home assistant has zones, areas but also the concept of rooms with MQTT Room Presence. Projects like ESPresense and other make room level presence detection available but this is separate to Areas and Zones. Could areas, zones and rooms not all conceptually be the same thing (lets call them locations for the sake of the discussion) with the ability to just give them a name (like an area), a location and radius or co-ordinates etc for a zone and then a room could just be an area. Then “Locations” have an occupancy state, that can be set by any sensor (e.g a generic motion sensor) but also a presence attribute where we could specify an array of users or devices that are present in that location.
Integrations like MQQT room Presence would then just be setting the presence of a device in a location. This could really simplify automations as it could be general based on room/zone/area occupancy or then on the specific presence of a device in a room/zone/area