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I think a lot of this is survivor bias. In order for a food to “make it” in another country, it has to be the top tier of the food in its own country. You aren’t getting trash tier Mediterranean cuisine where nonna opens the fridge and dumps odds and ends into a pot of canned tomato sauce and adds noodles to it. You aren’t getting the Chinese stir fry of chicken feet. What you’re comparing is often Western fast foods to other countries’ higher tier foods.
The other thing is that you likely eat western food daily. You have eaten millions of hot dogs and burgers. You’ve eaten your weight in French fries and Cole slaw. None of the flavors are new or exciting to you because you know what these things taste like. It’s not really a shock to the system to have yet another burger. You aren’t surprised by chicken noodle soup that you’ve been eating forever. Pho is new and interesting. Chinese food is interesting. Feta cheese tastes different than the cheese you grew up on. So you’re biased again, against western food not because it’s bad, but because it’s familiar and thus boring.
These are solid points, but I don't think they apply to my case.
I'm generally comparing popular candidates for "best pizza/burger/etc in the city" to non-Western food options and they still come up far short. On top of that, the burgers/etc. are often times recommended by Americans, whereas most of the time I have foreign cuisines with people from the relevant country they'll tell me it's only bad to average compared to what they'd find back home. Based on my experiences traveling to places like Italy/Japan they were absolutely right and "average" was being generous.
On the second point, my family almost never ate out as a child, so I was mainly introduced to these things simultaneously. The only "burgers" I had were McDonalds or Burger King and I only really think of them as "burgers" in the sense that Taco Bell makes "tacos". They were super health-conscious any wouldn't let me eat many hot dogs and the like, it was mostly lightly seasoned fish/chicken/vegetables/grains. There might be some slight effect in the sense that my average meal may have been closer to the new gourmet burger than to a ramen, but I don't think that effect is particularly large. (Funny enough, someone down-thread suggests the opposite - that early exposure creates a nostalgia effect as opposed to a familiarity-breeds-contempt effect).
Asian food tends to have a big advantage in the west because they bring over relatives with or without working papers to work in their restaurants, while domestic cuisine expects their kitchen workers to have finished cullinary school.
The "best burger" thing is a little different. I think it goes back to Blue Tribe aversions to eating beef. Going to a restaurant to try a "fancy" burger is a loophole in the taboo.
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