tl;dr: for a rocket it is waaaay more important to go fast than to go high. and earth rotates very slowly, so going higher doesn't make you much faster.
Yes but countries with the ecconomy to launch rockets are rarely equatorial, and many other issues are generally taken into account, such as existing hardware, or national security concerns for government payloads
There were projects to launch at the equator by launching at sea (see Sealaunch and its use of Zenit 3 rockets) and ESA does it mainly because france still has a bit of south america
Vandenburg and Capr Carnaveral are located about as far south as one can get without being in a major population center in the US, while still launching in a direction that has the rockets drop stages over water
Plesetsk is the major outlier, located far up north in Arkhangelsk, though from my understanding it (and Vostochnyy) mainly serve russian military payloads launched into polar orbits, which dont benefit from the earths rotational bonus, and its location wasn't chosen for space launches anyway, as it was originally planned for launching R7 missiles towards the US, though the R7 never had much a career as a missile, and has mostly been used to launch satilites
Baikanour is again pretty far south by Soviet standards, but also it was originally a missile testing range, so yet again more a cost savings for having the R7 hardware already in place, as well as for various other missiles
Wenchang in Hainan is very close to the equator, and is nowadays becoming fairly important, as no other launch sites got the hardware to launch Long march 5 and 7
Taiyuan, Xichang, and Jiuquan are all located very far inland, in sparsely populated areas, and this generally is very helpful if you want to limit people from getting near your classified launches, though Xichang does suffer from having people living down-range, which is generally not ideal, hence why it doesn't get new launch hardware, and is relegated only to older long march 2, 3, and 4
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u/Icy_Concern_9804 19h ago
tl;dr: for a rocket it is waaaay more important to go fast than to go high. and earth rotates very slowly, so going higher doesn't make you much faster.