Hi Mike,
I tried the code I posted on 12.1.1 and now it fails. I tried 12.0 and 12.1 and sometimes the first evaluation works but subsequent evaluations fail. Seems like a caching bug in the entity framework. To get it to reliably work on the first evaluation
Internal`ClearEntityValueCache["Country"];
but it will fail on subsequent evaluations.
@Luc Barthelet You should report this to WRI.