DovidBT,
The facts that “eretz” is a feminine noun and “makom” is a masculine noun were told to Moses by Hashem. The gender labels are not just an arbitrary human-created convention to help remember the language structure.
I’m not sure why there has to be an either-or setup here. In the Chumash, we see some words treated as feminine (i.e., treated the same way grammatically as female people), and others as masculine. No convention has to be invented to see this.