I was somewhat excited about these "sovereign" open models in the beginning, but it became soon apparent that they're not gonna be anything but toys compared to SOTA.
The problem is that there are a lot, at least 30, of these small projects scattered around, funded for a few years as some ad-hoc temporary coalition of universities and businesses. Those simply cannot compete with businesses spending tens of billions on developing these. Especially when you have to bring a spoon to a gunfight restricting to "clean" data.
Multilinguality is essentially a solved problem, and restricting too much on one language with more limited resources is gonna make the model worse in that language too.
Anyone can move the needle. Saying that languages are solved is not accurate as well. You could raise different questions like maybe model grounded in a different language will make it more efficient in some tasks, maybe language structure matters for a multidimentional space, maybe that matters for the distillation, etc. It is all about the ideas and their exchange, not about the investment rounds and MAU.
Even if multilinguality isn't solved, building a benchmark and then testing each model on it and posting the result may be a cheaper accelerator of competence in the language.