Sort of, but but really. You’re right that historically the daylight hours set an upper limit on the amount of work that can be done per week for most types of work, but that limit is far higher than 8 hours per day over 5 days. The 40 hour work week is based on unions fighting for a 40 hour work week. If it wasn’t for the unions you’d be working all day every day except Sunday, for religious reasons.
That might change over the next few decades too, the current fight is for a 4 day work week and studies are showing promising results there.
My work offered a compressed work week for a few years where employees could work the same number of hours over 9 days every fortnight, meaning they could take every second Friday off still working the same number of hours. Employees based in NA didn’t get that benefit, instead of trying to get that implemented over there NA employees were practically celebrating when the company recently scrapped it everywhere else instead.
My experience of American work culture is very much toxic crab-in-a-bucket mentality, pull everyone else down instead of trying to make work life the littlest bit more bearable, ironically directly contradicting the company’s slogan. The amount of brown-nosing sycophants on all-teams calls is pretty insane too.
So yes, I very much believe this is something American media would say.