To be fair, they were also absolutely groundbreaking. The VIC-II palette being described in the linked article shipped in the middle of 1982, and recapitulated a bunch of ideas from Atari's 1980 CTIA/GTIA chips. But I can boot a copy of Ultima V on my II+, a AAA title produced in 1988, and watch it display on framebuffer hardware that is almost completely unchanged[2] from what shipped in the summer of 1977!
[1] Also just the general delay of arrival to non-US markets and the higher price meant that Apple had a much smaller share. Europe for sure was a Commodore world, not sure about Brazil.
[2] The first few thousand boards shipped lacked a delay latch that allowed the high bit of a framebuffer byte to select the phase of the NTSC color. So extremely early Apple IIs had only four colors available and not six. As you might expect, Woz distributed rework instructions for owners to add this themselves.
We had Apple II clones for a long time - the military dictatorship wanted to develop a local industry and, to do it, they taxed heavily imports of any finished computer, as well as preventing foreign companies to start operations.
Brazil was mostly Apple II, then PC and MSX. All my IIs were local clones (some were very good ones, with multiple enhancements).
NTSC IIs can also do that trick, but the nature of NTSC makes it more limited.
OTOH, a PAL Apple II has issues drawing vertical straight lines, something the NTSC ones don’t.