This is a wildly misinformed comment that echos deeply but wrongly held beliefs about Europe in North America - both among laymen but also journalists. Let's look at the metrics you mentioned in which the US supposedly significantly outperformed the EU economy.

> measured by metrics of employment

Ignoring all the statistical cosmetics with technical definitions of who constitutes an "unemployed" person, we can simply look at the labour participation rate in both markets (figure 2). Not only is the EU trend positive, while the US trend is negative, the EU even caught up a massive discrepancy of ~10% in the last two decades which is also the time frame focused on in this study (80s and 90s -> setting up of regulators, 00s and 10s -> regulators making the EU single market more competitive).

> growth

This will inevitably re-ignite the also painfully misinformed debate about measuring GDP nominally vs purchasing power adjustments, but going with the latter reveals that the EU despite more direct disruptions (fall of the USSR, euro crisis, Brexit, recently the energy crisis/Russia's 2nd invasion of Ukraine) grew more or less at the same pace as the US economy. Since we're talking about growth here specifically, I'm sure we can all agree it makes sense to filter out noise from conversion rates and internal devaluation in the PIGS economies following the euro debt crisis. All of this despite the fact that the US population grew faster, meaning that GDP/capita in the EU has consistently grown faster for almost two decades. This is not just true for the new memberstates in CEE either, but a broad pattern across most EU countries (albeit much less pronounced in traditionally rich countries like Germany or Denmark).

>inflation

Ever since the introduction of the single currency, the eurozone and the US followed a very similar monetary strategy and therefore experienced similar inflation until very recently. Were it not for the war in eastern Europe, the eurozone actually proved to be more resiliant initially in the direct aftermath of Covid-19.

Those are my thoughts. I've been trying to argue these points for years, but to little avail to the overall perception. The narrative that Europe is an economic slump compared to the US isn't supported by the data, let alone that the difference is significant. Europe has slightly outperformed the US in every metric you have picked. We can even look at other indicators like fiscal responsibility. Government debt to GDP ratio or the annual goverment fiscal deficit - both of which are strongly believed to be European problems because of Italy and Greece - clearly show that the EU outperformed the US for quite some time.

EDIT: Typos.