> Interesting to contrast with Sweden, a country of 10m people, having a domestic fighter program to this day.

That's mostly driven off Sweden's postwar neutrality. Were Sweden a NATO member it's hard to imagine the country deciding to pay the almost prohibitively expensive cost of maintaining an indigenous aircraft industry, instead of buying from a larger ally. The Netherlands and Italy are among those NATO members that once produced their own fighter aircraft but no longer do so, instead joining multinational alliances or buying from elsewhere.