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Turbodiesels have a lot of hauling torque. That's what makes them attractive for long-haul trucking and industrial machinery.
The drawbacks are the high cost of the fuel delivery and emissions systems for modern diesels. In other markets, diesels are entrenched enough so that absorbing these costs is second nature. (just as absorbing the extra cost for direct-injection gasoline engines over there is apparently not a problem, where here, they're having a hard time penetrating, despite the abundance of modern diesels) Then there's the differing price, incentive and tax structures of fuels and automobiles outside the US, which also leads to greater acceptance of diesels.
As for truck sizes... that's a politically charged topic. Most of the world gets along with merely compact/midsized pick-ups, where in the US, this is a niche market. The cancelling of the Ranger, which was the biggest seller in this niche, could be seen as a admission of the poor profitability (and thus, market acceptance) of this niche or it could be seen as a cynical exercise in marketing... protecting the sales of Ford's volume-selling F150... as the new Ranger is now as big as the previous-generation F150. US HD trucks serve a market that's largely non-existent outside, which is why they are a uniquely American thing.
Then you get to the politics of chicken tax* and tow/payload ratings**, which, whatever your opinion of them, do help US automakers push customers up into bigger trucks with easier CAFE targets and higher profit margins. Not that displacement / CO2 / differential fuel taxes outside the US don't subsidize and push truck buyers into diesel midsizers, mind you.
While admittedly, there are people who do need the abilities of full-sized pick-ups, most hauling can be done by smaller, if the market structure allowed it, and most buyers don't even need a pick-up in the first place. But that's true of the pick-up (and large car) market everywhere, not just the US.
In the end, though, even if you evened out the playing field and removed all market distorting taxes, Americans are going to be buying full-sized trucks instead of small ones, and global buyers are going to be buying small/midsized trucks instead of full-sized ones. And that's that.
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*Worth thousands per unit unless you circumvent it by bolting in extra seats and ruining the rust protection of the pick-up bed. But with the government going after Ford and trying to tell them loophole exploitation as done with the Transit Connect is illegal, fat chance that's going to be viable in the future.
**Trucks in the US have lower payload ratings for their size than elsewhere, even if payload ratings are the same for non-truck vehicles. Hard to say whether that's an under-rating or over-rating happening on one side or the other, but in my experience, global platforms seem to be much more stiffly sprung and damped than US tucks, which might mean it's all down to market localization.
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