In Utah, homeschoolers either play for the team of the school they would attend if they were in school, or play on a “team” made up of all homeschoolers residing in a local school district.
As a homeschooling family, and viewing it from that perspective, it’s hard for me to imagine homeschoolers ever creating an association just to form a chess team. From a USCF perspective of preventing abuse however, MAYBE I could see a group of star players (with their priorities in the wrong place) deciding to become homeschoolers for this very purpose, but even that seems like quite a stretch.
On another note, depending on how you want to define them, our family belongs to no less than 3 home school associations (maybe up to 6 or 7) because different groups offer different resources and advantages, and none of them are full-tme commitments like traditional schools are. NONE of these groups’ members/participants are limited to a single township, city, school district, county, congressional district, etc. (except if you count our family as an association, since we all live the same house 
). In our personal case, all these groups’ members are in Ohio, but if we lived closer to a state line, that boundary would likely be broken as well.
We’re not on any association teams right now, but if we were, no matter which association we might form a team with, some members of that close knit group would have to be left out because they lived beyond some artificial boundary irrelevant to the group’s formation and existance. That’s what will make any boundary feel unfair to one extent or another from a homeschooler’s perspective.
Realistically, some sort of (liberal) boundary might be necessary for organization, but home schooling is a completely different animal vs. public and even private schools. Traditional schools tend to be like boxes that you can stack and organize relatively neatly, whereas homeschoolers are more like threads criscrossing and intersecting at multiple points across multiple layers like a 3-D web.
Whether it’s for chess or anything else, I think it’s a lot more difficult than they realize for non-homeschoolers to understand and appreciate the structural and attitudinal differences when trying to come up with solutions that fit homeschooling, if all they have for perspective is the traditional school models.
As I understand it the reason that the USCF defers to state rules is that it is the law in some states that home school students must be allowed to participate on school teams. IF the USCF had a rule prohibiting this, then schools in those states would have a real problem. Likewise in some states it is the law that students are not allowed to participate in any activities at a public school unless they are enrolled. This creates the same problem.