Are you sure that's the case for non-US crypto startups? Also, there are some ERC20 tokens that have better liquidity with the BTC pairing.
If you take bitcoin contributions, you need something offchain to track who contributed what, and issue a bunch of minting transactions.
Some ICOs do that, but if it's ERC20 that's generally in addition to automated minting via smart contract, and since the token and ICO are running on the Ethereum blockchain it's predominantly ETH that gets contributed.
Liquidity on exchanges later doesn't have much to do with any of that.