Exactly right. A big part of the airline market is to airlines based in second- and third-world countries where some (and perhaps many or most) of the pilots are not trained to U.S. standards. Boeing has successfully sold planes into those markets for years, and until the Max, those planes weren’t often brought down by pilot error. That changed with the Max; it was too easy to get into a situation requiring systems knowledge, airmanship, or just steely resolve that was clearly not possessed by every crew.
My recollection is that there were multiple instances where U.S. crews ran into the same problem which took down the two foreign planes, and the crews successfully dealt with it. That’s a testament to our high training standards, but it doesn’t mean the Max is fine as-is. The plane needs to be safe in the hands of the lowest-common-denominator crew.