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You know, I can acknowledge that the pattern you're seeing exists, but I've never taken that much umbrage at it, probably because I mostly limit my content to older, or really highly reviewed stuff. Similar, to the question of whether the demographics of the cast need to match the source material. But I did come across an instance of it recently that bothered me a little, and felt notable.
I really enjoyed Masters of the Air: it was really excellent on most of the axes I care about -- screenwriting, visuals, acting, and such. But at one point, during an ensemble shot of the American air crews, I thought to myself "those guys all look British," so I looked into it on IMDB -- most of the main cast are British or Irish. Even the Tuskegee Airmen weren't played by African-American actors. Some of that might have been due to pandemic restrictions, or using local actors for logistical reasons, but it felt off. Not that there aren't lots of Americans of such descent, but a group of (white, 1940s) Americans should look more diverse than that: I had a [redacted] whose family had recently immigrated from [Europe, not Britain] that served and died in a B-24 over Germany.
Maybe it's that it's intended as a historical account, but it feels like it cheapens the narrative ("heroic American airmen bring the fight to Nazi Germany"), and it's not as if the British weren't there and similarly heroic at the time. A similar series portraying RAF Bomber Command would probably be pretty interesting!
That said, I would recommend the series overall as a worthy followup to Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.
To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.
I highly recommend Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" if you want to see a british ww2 movie.
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To Americans, WWI is definitely seen as a second-rate prequel to the war that actually matters, but I get the impression that for Brits, the Great War still looms large, with WWII seen as a devastating but still far less psychologically damaging sequel. If I’m right about that, it probably explains why there aren’t (m)any British WWII movies.
There are many British WWII movies. I assure you. Many many.
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I've only ever seen consternation over black British actors playing black Americans, obviously because there's a weird protectionist sensibility over that turf. Nobody was ever giving Christian Bale or Benedict Cumberbatch shit for their American accents. At most, we chuckle a little bit when the accents slip at some of the corners (for some reason the hard pronunciation of 'are' is often a giveaway to me), but we just take it for granted that the British are born with thespian genetics.
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