Is it even viable to run for pope as a priest who spent his whole life in a first-world country? I can't imagine somebody who has spent a significant portion of his life doing charity work or spreading the church to some new population losing out to some guy who spends his whole career preaching to a crowd of predominantly-white bourgeois Americans in a boring midwestern suburb where the biggest problem is either too many DEI programs in local schools or not enough DEI programs in local schools.

There is no shortage of the downtrodden and dispossessed in the USA, if you seek them. The problem in this hypothetical would rather be that acknowledging and prioritizing such people in America is likely to be, for many fellow first worlders (to include parts of the American Catholic hierarchy) an inherently radical, polarizing, and political act. I doubt such a priest would be so rapidly promoted as was Leo XIV.

Acknowledging and prioritizing similarly marginalized people in poor countries, or at least in countries less tetchy about their failings and political pieties, carries less political risk. (Which is not to claim Prevost cynically avoided American ministry to the poor.)

That said, that such ministry is qualification at all seems to me more a product of Francis’s remaking of the college of cardinals with a notably Franciscan philosophy. The majority of post-WW2 popes have been European, of the first or second world. Benedict was German and John Paul Polish.