It's not pompous. When you attribute others of being pompous or smug, that's just your gut being triggered, and your defense mechanism kicking in. No need to be triggered.
> they ran the world but badly in need of an update
None of the comments here refer to any sort of longing for a colonial past.
Here's the thing about that article, and the invariable discussion that follow it.
Americans are modernists. We point at numbers. This number is bigger than that number, and therefore it is better.
There are differences in quality that can't be expressed in numbers. Cultural variety is much vaster in Europe than in America. e.g. How do you value knowing multiple languages. We can double down out of spite, seeing it as a triumph that you can get by with just english, but the joy of conversing day2day in multiple languages is a qualitative experience most of us do not comprehend. Yet it is a form of wealth, it accumulates in the mind, but wealth nonetheless.
How about having rich traditions (even watered down after centuries), having a terroir or countryside, the subjective experience of not always being surrounded by flimsy, disposable crap, ... It's all things americans have difficulties comprehending because it cannot be measured.
fwiw - there's subjective things in America a European cannot comprehend. e.g. the frictionless quality of uniformity, the respite from having unassuming neighbors, ...
It sounds like you have not visited the US, have an EU centered take on the world and seem to value culture greater than everything else (classic EU position to take). What you describe are caricatures of Europe and the US - it's probably best to go explore the world a bit more if you do hold the positions you mentioned above as they aren't uniformly accurate.