Actually it's the opposite, the last played and played history is stored per-track and generating a playlist just uses this information for repeat protection.
It works like this, if you set e.g. "Do not repeat artist X minutes" it will work regardless when and why track by this artist had played before (manually added to the playlist, added from this or another preset, other ways) - the repeat protection checks what had actually played and when. The repeat protection times are set per-preset, and per-category when needed (e.g. you may want to allow hot rotation tracks to play more often than usual music).