I'm German, so I'm basing my statement on almost 34 years of living here. In case you want some more details from an actual bank, read this [1].
Basically, we don't need credit cards, not even for renting cars, because we have robust regulation and our own national cashless payment schemes plus SEPA. Direct debit is just fine for us.
I have never encountered even that. My debit card also works great for in-person payments in the US, with the only exception perhaps being rentals.
Yes, but not necessarily MasterCard/Visa debit cards. Germany's Girocard for example is a national debit card scheme that does not use any of the American grifters. Unfortunately, it's being phased out in favor of MC/Visa because the EU fee cap on national schemes is much lower than for MC/Visa and so banks can make more money off of you.
We're just standing by and watch our dependence on American grifter megacompanies larger every day.
And even for those who have credit cards, they are "pay in full at the end of each month" cards, not American-style revolving credit cards. And stuff like the "cashback" cards of Americans, that's also not very common here since the "cashbacks" are actually paid for by the merchant on top of the interchange fee - but there's an EU law that places a hard cap of IIRC 1% on the merchant fees, so there is barely any way for banks to incentivise people to use credit cards.
And on the bank side, here in Europe we also don't really have that "debt holders can just sell off defaulted debts" thing, so banks can't offload the risk of defaults to someone else. And if that's not enough, we also got very strict laws on who can get approved for a credit card and for which limits - stuff like 20 year olds with 20, 30k of credit card debt are truly rare unless the parents of said young people are rich enough to back such a massive CC limit.
This is not true.
International payments are a huge huge goddamn mess and I do not envy anyone who has to deal with their peculiarities.
