You could still have your player device set to a static 24 or 30 without VRR, in theory, but none of the devices I tried (granted, this was ~8 years ago) supported that anyway.
That’s interesting. Pretty much every Blu-Ray player should support this. I can confirm from firsthand experience that Apple TV, Roku, and Android TV devices also all support this. I can’t speak for Amazon’s fire stick thingy though.
The feature you are looking for is not to manually set the refresh rate, but instead for the device to set it automatically based on the framerate of the content being displayed. On Apple TV it’s called “match frame rate”.