If anything, it seems to be going the other way to me. In Europe, programming jobs only requiring English (and not the local language) seem steadily on the rise

If anything, it seems to be going the other way to me. In Europe, programming jobs only requiring English (and not the local language) seem steadily on the rise, because it means companies can pull talent from other parts of Europe, or even further abroad. If you're a German company that wants to also be able to hire coders from France and Italy and Romania, requiring German proficiency is going to drastically cut down the potential international labor pool you can draw on. And that's for one of the biggest European languages -- imagine what the calculus is if you're a company in Denmark or Slovenia. Plus, let's say you start with the local language, but then your company gets big. At some point, you may want to open up offices in other countries...but what do you do then? Have German source code from your German devs, and French source code from your French devs?