Alternatively they could have went with not 5 generation, but still extremely good Gripen.

It's electronic warfare capabilities have reportedly surprised Nato pilots in exercises before.

Extremely good is getting a bit over the top. The Gripen was designed in the 80's and it shows. It cannot really compare with something like the F-22 or 35 on anything substantial except cost. And if you're optimizing for cost, it becomes a question of how many pilots you're willing to lose to make it fulfill realistic roles.

Which jet will they prefer if they need to defend Greenland? A dated and affordable gripen, or an F35 that the Americans will just beam a kill -9 command to via a backdoor?

Gripen has an American engine and uses American licensed missiles.

Can probably also use other missiles but I agree we need to get rid of all US dependencies and I guess a lot of effort is going on now to see what can be done to get rid of the American engine.

Maybe a cooperation with French (Safran) or British (Rolls Royce) industry could remove their reliance on the Americans? (Not suggesting overnight but over the next 2 - 7 years.)

Snecma Gripen would be pretty sick.

The best medium range missile usable from a Gripen is the Meteor, which is a European product. Of course the issue is that production isn’t high enough.

Good point I forgot about the meteor.

Presumably you can't brick an engine. The F-35 can be.

There's zero chance the F35s will even be able to take off when the US attacks Greenland, while the chance of Chinese planes defending Denmark from the US is non-zero.

Also, they could have bought European planes (Rafale).

The Chinese and Russian would certainly have provided continued support if they were on the other end of a conflict, differently from the Evil Bad American Empire.

That money could have been used on drones or other weapons rather than buying expensive paper weights.