I’ve seen multiple videos equivalent of Americans pointing where (country) is on the map, and there was an instance where the host asked the woman where the continent Africa is located (points to Asia) like WTF? That’s not even close at all.
I know there’s bias towards those types of videos since there are accusations of the host “handpicking” select strangers framing them as if they are representative of the US. But the truth is that their education system isn’t good as it lacks funding.
When you put it into perspective: how many Europeans can correctly locate & name countries adjacent to them within their own continent and globally? Is the education system within the EU that good or effective at teaching kids that subject?
IMO China is an outlier because the language barrier is much thicker than for most other polities. It’s substantially harder to remember a place if the (romanized) name looks like word salad and many or even most of the sounds in it don’t even exist in your language. Contrast Japan - while the romanized names still look very foreign, they can be pronounced with relative ease (even if not quite correctly).
That said, I generally don’t make a point of remembering internal subdivisions of other countries. It’s just not as important as knowing where countries are, and internal regions (e.g. “midwest USA” or “frankophone Switzerland”) that actually do have significance often don’t really follow administrative divisions.