This is rather hilarious to read as a reply to someone whose day job is literally hacking in Germany. We document it for tax reasons and sometimes are even allowed to publish it, too! Besides paying clients, we also "hack" (read: help secure) projects and blog about the vulnerabilities we've found and what the disclosure timeline was

Clearly this doesn't work as a blanket statement and coordinated vulnerability disclosure is a thing here. I can agree there are caveats but the statements as made aren't accurate

As for dealing with the government, so far as I'm aware, none of us have had bad experiences with the German IT security agency (BSI) whenever a vendor was being uncooperative (healthcare vendors tend to be very, let's say, German about whose responsibility it is when their device sends genital pictures over a network with no encryption or authentication option available in the software)

There are some infamous counter-examples, but you can find these in any country and it's these that make the news.

Have you been to the US? If not how can you be certain that the US is truly worse?

You are describing cognitive dissonance, I suspect most people do have it about their country (unless they really like history in which case they are aware of the fucked up things their country has done and there is much less dissonance) but the average US citizen is very much an outlier by the standard of western countries.

Even the smart ones who do know history often only know their side of it from their point of view and many of them have very little understanding of the world beyond their borders (because they simply have no need to).

They just seem to blur the border between nationalism and patriotism more than most countries.