Oh, absolutely.

Hey, but in return you receive government tokens which will pay back in worse times... if you satisfy a lot of conditions, and wait in many queues, and send many letters.

$200k is €180k, in Germany you'd take home 57% or $112k. In California you'd take home $134k

Not sure of the relative costs of housing in San Francisco vs Berlin, but it doesn't feel like a massive difference. Personally I'd rather live in Berlin on €112k net than San Francisco on $134k net

If you want to attract the best people in the EU it's the fact, and not even for a discussion, that you have to pay them the good $$$. Those people are found in places where the most complex infrastructure software is being built. And that is for worse or for the better is only found in FAANG or HFT or similar very large-scale software where even saving a few cents per line of code is bringing big profits to the company. How many such EU-based products are out there?

Your perspective of "delivering more work in less time" is cute. Put yourself in a pool of 95th percentile of engineers on the market and you will soon find that your experience is not representative.