Who told you that? That was not my experience at all working there a few years back. Even for global teams like AWS engineering support, the US offices easily tripled the international ones in number of engineers.

I knew exactly one team based in Germany, but that was only because AWS acquired that product and team.

that's a pretty nice red herring you've introduced there my friend!

you haven't addressed any of the points i've brought up, but instead introduced a very tangential (possibly true) fact.

reflect for a moment on what i've said above. you are introducing a dichotomy that isn't accurate and justifying it by saying "something is better than nothing", which is the same corporate rationale for having a .000001% tax rate, states going crazy to attract huge companies, and so forth.