Yeah EU is not competitive in tech. They missed the boat by.. decades. And the salary of engineers in EU is not good enough to make it attractive either for those who can and want to live abroad.

I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.

Honestly, I think it's straightforward to fix. Requirements to attempt to source domestically (or at minimum try hard) plus loosening the rules on firing employees (yes it sucks, but hiring is super risky when it takes 0.5 - 3 years of salary to dispose of an employee, either a bad one or one that isn't the right person for a growing business) would go a long way towards jumpstarting domestic software production.

They don't seem to want to :shrug:

There is an awful lot of software produced in the EU. The problem is that as soon as someone is even moderately successful with something a US (or rather, an SV) based entity will make you an offer you can't refuse.

That's not exactly true. There certainly are areas where US options are clearly the best, but even in cases where a local alternative is viable there is a massive push to use US based services instead, and unsurprisingly the local options then stay small when even their own governments refuse to use them.