Brit here.

This is true, but I find it hard to believe others in the world don't do this.

America is known in its service industry for "you're welcome" after a customer says "thanks" (and as kids visiting Florida, my brother and I loved deliberately triggering that response).

While Americans probably don't say "you're welcome", since it's the AI in servitude, language has many variants and patterns that could equally cost the earth.

For example, if I remember many German words are longer than their English variant, and you can legitimately create new compound words from others.

The British politeness is just an egregious and simple to point at example of that waste because it aligns with a singular extra request, it's the token count that is the real problem.

It costs you tokens to be nice,but it aides user satisfaction and contentment.

It would be trivial to fix this.

The Smithsonian labelling “politeness” as “White Supremacy” is peak Woke.