If one takes Google or YouTube or Facebook or Outlook they default to local language. Can't they use the browser language or OS language to default to that language.
I can forgive even 'regular sites' like Facebook, Outlook or YouTube. but increasingly even coding sites Github/Google Developers also do it. Why is it needed? Most devs I know of want to have menus/etc in English (as it helps searching or reading documentation).
To me it seems easier to display the page in a language matching the accept-language header than to do a geoip lookup and guess what language they want. In some countries they speak multiple languages so it doesn't even make sense to do geoip.
Most of my friends don't speak English so defaulting to English isn't a good solution either.