You called my number absurd even for SV. As you now see, it is reasonably accurate. That you thought it was absurd instead of reasonable shows you are missing key information in the cost-benefit calculation. It might be prudent to re-evaluate your preconceptions in light of that.
As for your other numbers you again point at salary. What matters to a company is fully burdened cost per developer-time. European countries have higher benefits and lower hour/day expectations per year which skew the ratio relative to the US. I am not super familiar with the standard rule-of-thumb multiplier in western Europe, but the difference in fully burdened cost is less skewed than it seems based on salary, probably only 2-3x cheaper at most.
As for China, you used the yen conversion rate, not the RMB/yuan conversion rate. 269,904 RMB is ~37 K$, not 1800 $.
Paying fractions of employee cost in tooling is only viewed as absurd in software. In literally every other industry spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per engineer to make them productive is just viewed as good business sense.
Even outside of engineering almost every industry spends more as a percentage on employee tooling. Do you see how many tools your average carpenter, plumber, or electrician has? Landscapers, architects? Even secretaries get those neat expensive printers and management software.
The point I am making is that tens of thousands of dollars for tooling is not “insane”. It deserves a calm cost-benefit analysis which can quite easily come on the side of worth it. Obviously, it can also come on the side of, this is a piece of trash, but that should be out of analysis, not a knee-jerk “too expensive”.