How many tiny US startups have been successful in EU markets?
I'm from Norway, we're ~5 million people here. You're not going to have a ton of users, and hence employees, before having to study other countries' rules and regulations. Some of which might not be available in English, and we all know how great it is to use automatic translation for that.
We had <10 employees when our company branched out into the Nordic countries. Complying to rules and regulations has been a constant struggle, and I suspect impossible if not for the fact that we're a B2B shop, as B2C is much more regulated.
That said, I'm not disagreeing with the main point of the post. I think we and our media could take more pride in local software.
The weird thing is that for physical goods, and especially food here in Norway, I feel like there already is this patriotism OP finds lacking in software.