And TBH you can't really extrapolate your residence in one place to conditions in all of Europe, it is quite different.
I'm guessing parent also lives in Lisbon or Oporto, which doesn't exactly extrapolate cleanly to rest of Portugal even.
Not that old. 2010, maybe?
It's a building with 4 stories. We're on the second (Portuguese would call it the first floor; like hackers, they count the ground floor as zero).
If you walk out our door, you see an elevator and a stairwell with an insulated steel door to the stairs. That's it; that's the only point of egress.
Though in a pinch, I could jump from the balcony and probably just break an ankle or something.
I might be misunderstanding, but isn't the OP all about how Europe allows single-stairway and the US does not?
I was living in an Apartment in Sweden built in 2018 with only a central staircase and no sprinklers and never actually noticed anything else in the few years I lived there