I may be misunderstanding, is this statement suggesting that the advice to use lawyers in Germany is simply standard op procedure, and not even remotely necessary? As it really isn't necessary in the US, especially with how easy it is to change or update later if it gets to that point.

I have incorporated (s-corp), created a couple LLC's and briefly used a sole proprietorship with a DBA filed in my county - this one was by far the most annoying, time consuming, and confusing one. The state filings took maybe 10-15 minutes of filling out straight forward online forms, $1 (at the time for a name search) and $300 to file. Soon after I was the paper owner of a legal corporation (or LLC's). The most complicated part was understanding taxes, but the application of taxes is separate from starting the company (assuming you understand the best tax structure for what you are doing). If anything, an Accountant is way more important imo.

In the US, getting a lawyer just to incorporate is flushing money down the drain. At best you can do it yourself (and in most states it's not particularly complex), at worst there are cheap online services to help you.

Don’t forget the accountant. Once you start payroll things get an order of magnitude more complex.

There's a lot of small, one-person shops that manage to make LLC's and stuff in the U.S.. There's books on how to do it yourself. In my state, there's little paperwork, too.

Germany sounds way more difficult.

Not at the early stages.

Because software has enormous fixed costs and low marginal costs, so spreading the fixed costs across more users improves the economics, often by a large factor.

It’s not that it’s strictly required, but it’s so beneficial that it’s often chosen.

MA Lighting, by far the largest and most dominant lighting console manufacturer.

They are the industry standard around the world, no one even comes close.

SAP

I suppose OP specifically excluded SAP as it was founded more than 40 years ago.

SAP predates the personal computer and the rise of the VC model in the 80s.

Its a bad sign if you have to go back over 50 years.

Siemens is also huge in software.

AUTOSAR alliance is an organization based in Germany defining automotive ECU software architectures. Most automotive SW development is happening in Germany.

It was founded over 50 years ago. It had already been running for decades before Amazon, Google or Facebook were even founded.