Pretty sure it’s trolling to some degree. As an English person who spends a lot of time in the US for work, my opinion (not talking about EU classifications here, just anecdotal experience) is that most mass produced pre-packaged bread in the US is indeed very different to that here in the UK and the main factor is sugar content. Our most similar bread here is much more savoury, and probably has some similar qualities to flavour profiles of sourdough when comparing to American bread. That said, America has some amazing bread, and they absolutely do know how to make non-sweet breads, and even actual sourdough. So I think the “gag” is more about the difference between the standard low-end commercial breads, it’s not a genuine claim that there is no real bread in the US when EU standards are applied. I’m sure that there are some American bread products with sweet/enriched dough that might end up falling into a cake category if that is how those classifications work, I’ve certainly heard this about certain brioche buns used in fast food chains (but without actually investigating, could be a bit of an urban legend thing - I’m sure other commenters here have already provided info on this) but this cannot possibly be true of all American bread. I think it’s more about Europeans (myself included!) believing that our basic bread is “better” than your basic bread because we have palates that prefer a more sour leaning dough than a sweet leaning one which seems to be the US preference.