What our disposable friend claimed was that there are few "real tech companies", not that there are few roles. There's some truth in that; there are lots of jobs working for banks, supermarkets, consultancies, publishers, etc, but relatively few in companies which are either pure-play tech (who is the British Microsoft or Dropbox?) or even consumer web (who is the British Facebook or Google?).

That might or might not be a bad thing. It means you're more likely to be working for a real company, with a real business model, rather than some freak kept above by advertising and VC misallocation.

ARM is pretty well known

Yeah that's literally the one that comes to my mind. Germany seems to have a strong robotics market (not only industrial, but also self-driving cars kind of stuff etc.) but most job posts I see are either straight in German or require a good command of it.