I'm not sure, my guess is maybe foreign pilots are less fimilar with Boeing planes. The reason for the Max crashes from the past was due to the pilots not getting enough training on the new plane and made assumptions about it based on the previous generation plane. It wasn't the actual plane that was bad it was Boeing training wasn't good enough for pilots to understand the changes they made.
There is a grain of truth but your position is inaccurate. Boeing split off important software systems on the 737 MAx into paid upgrades. That’s not a training issue.