I'd note that tech pundits and journalists have been saying for 20 years that many US jobs would move to India and other countries, but offshoring, while common, hasn't really made a dent in the US tech sector. It's interesting to think about why.
Later in my career I worked with a team from Hong Kong as well, the cultural gap was less significant and they were able to work well with the management style given. We still had timezone issues (moreso since I'm from the UK which is further from HK than from India), but because they interpreted tickets in the same way and had similar views on what the definition of done was things were far more harmonious.
Communication is a huge factor in remote teams, and whilst there are lots of tools to aid it, communication styles across cultures can be very different which can cause a lot of friction.
I definitely agree with you though. We interviewed one person that was exceptionally good: very experienced, good comms, ticked all the boxes. His salary expectation was around a junior dev salary in the UK, which unfortunately was too high for management who had set a budget per developer, rather than thinking it was worth hiring him and one other instead of four lukewarm devs.
Another was their definition of done. They would finish a ticket and mark it as resolved as soon as the functionality is partially working. I think because QA is enormously cheap in India they were used to handing things off to QA as soon as possible to save their own time. We didn't have a QA department so that was quite problematic. I started having to include all the edge cases I could think of in the ticket.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong, it was just different, different levels of politeness and views on managing their time. But it was these differences that made things more difficult for everyone involved than I expected. They probably had a lot of issues with my management style as well, although they were too polite to say anything :)
Could it be the proximity to similiar-culture Eastern Europe where inexpensive developers are easily available?
I've never lived in the Netherlands, but I hear that employers there will also contribute towards a pension for an employee. This pension will be managed by some sort of private company. I'm not sure if it's a defined contribution or defined benefits pension. The details on when you get your pension and how much you get probably depend on the company that is managing it. It may be that a couple years of working will get you a very small pension or it may be that there's a minimum qualifying period. In any case, you should be able to get some benefit from it, even if it's a one-time lump sum payment.
If you google around, you can find stories of long-time ex-pats getting blindsided by the taxes associated with those pensions.
In terms of "take home per month", expect between 2.5kE and 3.5kE for places like Ireland/Germany/Netherlands (YMMV) for a higher seniority
Now in Spain, Portugal, Italy it is going to be lower