> I'm not opposed to them btw, but as a Dutch person I found it weird to have this all split out.
No problem, I'm just trying to shed some light into it for those not German and/or not familiar with how it works in Germany. Also, these things are difficult and there are many pros and cons, so I'm not even sure what my own opinion is on many of those things. But I can at least provide some pros & cons and then everyone can make up their own mind about it.
> In NL you get AOW no matter if you're the queen or just Joe, you just have to be of pensionable age and iirc lived in NL during your working life.
In Germany it's different because the amount of your pension depends on your contributions - hence it makes sense for it to be different from tax that you pay (which have no impact on your pensions at all).
At the same time it has benefits if things are listed out separately, because it increases transparency to where your money goes. At the same time it increases beaurocracy (and hence costs for administration) quite a bit, in particular for foreigners.
> The public broadcasts are financed with tax money but not every household separately gets a bill equivalent to a Netflix subscription to be paid for a year ahead.
The reason why this is a fee in Germany and not a tax lies in the idea that the public media should be more independent from the politics. Whether this really works or not is a different question, but it was set up like this so that politicians can't "threaten" journalists and public media by reducing their budgets if they don't do as politicians want. At the same time. The process for deciding on the amount of the fee is a bit complicated and involves politicians as well, but not only.
It definitely adds friction that it's a separate system. For instance, exceptions are being made for certain groups e.g. people who live on social welfare, who are students without income and sufficient financial support from their parents, people who have heavily impaired vision/hearing and so on.