> This experience fits a pattern I keep running into with European business-facing APIs and services. Something is always a little bit broken. Documentation is incomplete, or packaged as a nasty PDF, edge cases are unhandled, error messages are misleading, and when you report issues, the support team doesn't have the technical depth to understand what you're telling them.

I can definitely confirm that this is a common thing. But I think this is a "small org"-problem more than a "European business"-problem. Apparently, the company has somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees (I couldn't find good data, sadly). With a size like this, the "support" is probably outsourced (meaning they don't know anything), there are maybe 100 engineers (probably less) and the mailing is either done via a third-party or set up by an Admin that left three years ago.

Without any basis, I will speculate that you will notice this more in Europe because there is simply no company at the size of Stripe or similar.

While there is some truth in while you saying, I have to say that from my European perspective all the big American companies feel enormously bloated. For example, I've recently learned thats Atlassian has 13000 employees, and I have to ask myself, what do all those people do?