I think yes, it's just that they expected the regulatory system to work. Companies intentionally defeating emissions tests, unthinkable! ... just as unthinkable as the FAA rubberstamping whatever Boeing puts in front of them :(
I'm not sure this is true in a practical sense. For example, Airbus does the same unbelievable things with AoA sensors that Boeing did with MCAS: even if they have two or three of them on an aircraft, they don't compare them before allowing one sensor to drive automatic functions, so a single failed sensor can cause the airplane to do unexpected and dangerous things (for example, multiple uncommanded pitch down events on Quantas Flight 72). A true adversarial regulator would never have allowed such design flaws.
[1] "The exact nature of the corruption was that the ADIRU CPU erroneously re-labelled the altitude data word so that the binary data that represented 37,012 (the altitude at the time of the incident) would represent an angle of attack of 50.625 degrees." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
So the EU's "vaunted" adversarial regulator actually was doing a much worse job than the FAA.
The EUs move for greater local safety review, ironically, might make Airbus less safe, since they might be able to capture the EU regulators.
[edit] to emphasize: it's not market competition or the EU being better than the USA that's different. It's just the quasi-monopoly the FAA has on global aviation safety checks and the effect it has on foreign versus local companies.
In fairness, if there were multiple US aircraft manufacturers, they might battle each other for FAA regulatory capture and prevent either of them from achieving it.
[double edit] For the reverse of this see Dieselgate: discovered by some random American(named of all things John German) and pushed into the limelight by the EPA or whatever. It's not a perfect metaphor since he worked for an NGO, but arguably even civil society faces a sort of funder capture. Would German environmental NGOs have blown the whistle on something like this? Maybe?