As a German not working in Germany - I often get the feedback that the initial contact with me is rather off-putting, but over time people start appreciating my directness.

Bless your heart.

The problem is, performing social interaction theatre is way more important than actually using logic to solve issues. Look at how many corporate jobs are 10% engineering and 90% kissing people's assess in order to maintain social cohesion and hierarchy. Sure, you say you want "short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans" but guess what - most people say some variation of that, but when they actually see such behavior, they get upset. So we continue with the theatre.

For reference, see how Linus Torvalds was criticized for trying to protect the world's most important open source project from weaponized stupidity at the cost of someone experiencing minor emotional damage.

That is a fair assessment, but on the other hand, yes men are not required to do things, despite people liking them. You can achieve great things even if your team is made of Germans.

My tongue-in-cheek comment wonders if having actors with a modicum of personality to be better than just being surrounded by over-enthusiastic bootlickers. In my experience, many projects would benefit from someone saying “no, that is silly.”

For some reason, the capitalistic market time and time again favors bootlickers, so there must be some feature of an army of bootlickers that we're missing.

While you are not alone, all evidence points to the vast majority of people preferring "yes men" as their advisors. Often to their eventual harm.

One would think that if AI was as good at coding as they tell us it is a style toggle would take all of five, ten minutes tops.

Ok, then I can write an LLM too - because the guys you mention, if you asked them to write your code for you, would just tell you to get lost (or a more strongly phrased variation thereof).

Not possible.

/s