I am not sure I understand the question. When you turn on regions, it makes extra labels, but the generic labels still exist.
That is, with a *.msh file containing
$PhysicalNames
2
2 100 "my_surface"
3 200 "my_vol"
the return of DMGetLabelName(dm, n, name) would be (order may differ)
n = 0, name = "celltype"
n = 1, name = "depth"
n = 2, name = "Cell Sets"
n = 3, name = "my_vol"
n = 4, name = "Face Sets"
n = 5, name = "my_surface"
...
I poked into src/dm/impls/plex/plexgmsh.c and have managed to print all the labels after changing a couple of variable values, so perhaps it is doable.
The changes made are not a solution, simply naively set some variables to skip checking for the use_regions flag, so it understandably crashes soon after.
Thanks, Noam