I'm going to go against this and say no. We swap gene locations, all the time wholesale in mice, and usually the effect is limited. That doesn't get you a paper, so of course you publish when something... more interesting crops up.

It's just that there are many well-studied systems where where there are profound and severe effects that are singly extremely consequential, where you go "huh, wouldn't have guessed that" and the cause turns out to be really subtle.

If we're going with eukarya writ large, it's even less. Basically entire programs of plant husbandry is the industrial process of performing chromosomal translocation and overloading, and picking the one out a thousand? ten thousand? that reveals a commercially useful variant.

And yeast, well we've sliced and diced those chromosomes like no one's business (but it turns out they are particularly robust). I would go so far to say as "the general rule is that chromosomal location doesn't matter in yeast, with a handful of exceptions".

Conversely, there is one gene whose chromosomal location is basically invariant in prokarya, that's dnaA, which pretty much "has to be close to the ori".