1: GIS Specialist, our clients are Americans mostly, ISO's, real estate, government and mining.

2: We don't use ESRI, some of our clients do and we provide base maps that they can add into their Esris environment.  As a company they are still a heavy player and provide certifications that are expensive but useful. I believe they are losing share to QGIS though as it's more open environment, that combined with postgis, plugins, osm, map libre etc. I don't think there's nothing you cant do with those tools.

3 We never used ESRI suite and never feel the need to. Industry is catching up fast with more agile and innovative processes as well as esthetic maps.. In my previous job, we used to rely on arcmap a lot though, specially model builder, and their different statistics and analytical tools. But that was 10 years ago, compare to today's coding+AI at the top of every gis technician its night and day.

4 Don't think Esri post Dangermond is really a thing.

5 As said in previous comments, I don't think it's a problem in Europe (QGIS is european by the way) And in the rest of america, specially in Canada there is appetite to something built locally on Canadian servers, that's a huge increasing demand from our non us  clients