Abdullah ibn Kathir was born in Mecca and taught there, and the reading that bears his name is the reading of the sanctuary. He belonged to the generation of the Followers, the students of the Companions, and died in 120 AH, which places him among the earliest of the seven readers and a good deal closer to the first generation than most of them. His family was of Persian descent, which the epithet al-Dari is usually taken to record, and nothing about that was unusual in a city that drew scholars from everywhere the pilgrimage reached.
The Meccan line matters in the same way the Medinan one does. Mecca received one of the codices Uthman distributed, and the recitation practised around the sanctuary was held to run back through Abdullah ibn Abbas, the Prophet's cousin and the most cited of the early exegetes, to the Companions who had first collected the text. Ibn Kathir's teachers are named in that line. What his reading does not have is a modern region.
Where Nafi went west with Warsh and Asim went everywhere with print, Ibn Kathir is now studied rather than used: it is learned in the schools of recitation, examined, and preserved in the works of the discipline, but no congregation anywhere recites it as its ordinary practice. That is the condition of most of the twenty transmissions, and it says something about how the canon works. A reading does not need current use to hold its place in it. It needs a chain.