I entirely agree with your point about global technical talent. Most of the top 40 or 50 countries have plenty of it.

I've been reading discussions like this thread for more than two decades, since the early days of the boom in the 1990s. I think the mistake being frequently made in this thread and every other thread, is the premise that you can replicate the super context that the US and China represent. I don't believe there is anything realistically that Germany, France, Britain, Russia, et al. can do to recreate what those two uber markets have going for them. It is impossible to do it.

The focus is always on things like funding, taxes, regulations, cultural aversions to risk, and so on. It doesn't matter. In the time a German start-up with identical funding is working on grinding its way through 40 different countries in Europe (most with 1/4 to 1/2 the spending power of consumers in the US) to match the economics of the US market, the US peer already owns the US market, and is assaulting the global market from its position of strength. The US company can then spend abnormal sums of capital on prying away each individual market in Europe, country by country, thanks to that US haven. It instantly puts the European competitor/s on their heels, and discourages investors. The US is by a large margin the most lucrative, accessible, big market on the planet (and you almost automatically get another large market with it, via Canada); if a competitor locks that up, you've got a problem in which you'll never be safe from them using the US market as a springboard to perpetually assault your European position. It becomes a strategy of divide and conquer then.

Europe - the EU specifically - has two choices. Blockade foreign competition ala China (no guarantee that will work out well, it may lead to stagnation and brain drain, along with foreign market restriction tit-for-tat). Or complete the full integration of the EU and push for language, regulatory and cultural consolidation (that will never happen).

If you're an individual company, you have another option: get a big part of the US market early on. Spotify did this (and as others have noted, Swedish companies seem to be quite adept at it thanks to the wide adoption of English and understanding of US culture there). If they hadn't, they'd be back on their heels right now as Apple Music rapidly gets larger (Apple Music would have all of the US market and would be pressing that much harder on Spotify now).

Atlassian as another example, would be a far smaller company without their piece of the US market. They'd be a trivial takeover target for someone else, as Australia + New Zealand would never provide enough of a base of scale to compete toe to toe with the giants.

The US market is why Shopify is worth $17 billion and growing so fast. Had they just focused on Canada, a US competitor would wipe them out and or acquire them on the cheap. They had to get the US market or else. With that US springboard in place, used properly, they can go get the world, using the US as an immense funding engine for expansion. Out of that market capture they'll have accomplished 10x growth, from $100m in sales to $1b, in less than five years. Getting that sales snowball to roll downhill in the US, is one of the cheapest forms of expansion funding there is, once it goes, it goes.