Not happy about this, especially considering Europe was and is so important to the PlayStation brand.
I'm quoting you, but just picking up on this Europe vs America sentiment in general:
There are two different things here.
The re-headquartering of SIE to the US. This happened a couple of years ago. SIE was never headquartered in Europe, so in this regard nothing has really changed for SIEE. Their headquarters is in the US rather than Tokyo, but it was never in Europe. If there was a power shift here, you could cast Tokyo as the loser rather than Europe.
The second thing, which I think is more immediately relevant to these layoffs, is the restructuring of some operations to globalise things. This hasn't just just affected Europe - SIEA people were made redundant too. Sony has been reorganising
some functions into global teams. By my understanding those teams are not just located in the US - they are multi-office teams distributed between San Mateo and London. They're international teams, not 'americans handling everything'. In de-regionalising some functions into those teams, American regional operations have found redundancies too.
There are still some regional functions, I don't think everything has been 'globalised'. Local PR and event handling and the like will still happen I'm sure. But, for example, screen advertising creative is now handled by one global agency rather than per region arrangements as before (the ps now ad is the first from that agency). Dev account management has been globalised - good for global, multi region devs who can now go through one team for everything, but you can understand rancour from some others who may have been more comfortable dealing with one local regional office for single-region releases, for example.
edit - I could be wrong on the above things, but it's my understanding based on news, job postings etc. It's sensitive stuff for people affected by layoffs, so I apologise if my observations are inaccurate in any way.