This is fromt he point of view of someone that is fluent in English.
I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population.
It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers.
But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click.
For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.
The problem is not the localization. It's choosing the default language based on anything other than explicit info provided by user-agent - that is, URL and Accept-Language, in that order.
I can't speak about France, but my experience in the U.S. is that recent immigrants who can't speak English still set their computers to English.
For some it's because they're so used to the non-English versions of web pages being so bad or abbreviated that having an English page they can half read is often better than the truncated "good enough" version provided in their native tongue.
Yes, the english level is terrible in my country. Unfortuntly, translation is imperative if you want to enter the market. Which sucks, because it's a huge waste. There is not benefit to it: a UI is not like a book, you don't lose some quality in translation. In fact, most UI are worse once translated because english is a short and to the point language, which is what you want for buttons and menus.
I assure you that in countries like France, Italy, Spain, etc... this is true but for a small percentage of the population.
It makes no business sense for a company not to localize a website or a service, if your market has a substantial number of non-English speakers.
But yes, for my own convenience (unironically), I wish that every website had a base English version that you could access with a single click.
For example I was looking at some Microsoft webpage with troubleshooting or API information (can't remember). By default it was shown traslated based on my location, but there was a prominent "Read this in English" switch at the top. Top marks.