I've worked at a few FAANGs in the US, and every single one after 2010 had an on-call rotation.
The way contracts are worded, time working on on-call is work-time. Kinda obvious if you write it like that. As such, bad on-call weeks easily cut into the normal duties of the employee. This means team leads have an incentive to reduce time wasted on on-call.
You have mandatory rest-times. If an on-call activity takes an hour or so to fix, the person is suddenly not allowed to work for 10 hours due to these rest-time and maximum work time laws. Suddenly, "some little fixing at night" means the person isn't allowed to work the whole morning.
With a few rules like that, pages become really painful to the company. When a bad application kept pinging on-call every night for a few days, the entire normal work ground to a halt with people being unavailable, other team members dropping project work from sprints to pick up daily business slack. Some product managers got really pissed off and things in that product improved - I'm kinda curious what happened behind closed doors there. .
1. Uncompensated oncall is legally tricky in many EU companies, so a lot of midsize companies look at the cost of paying for oncall, or sometimes just the time of administering paying for oncall, and decide they can do without. High frequency oncall is also often restricted (e.g. more than 1 week in 6 is not legal here)
2. A lot of the smaller companies are europeans selling to europeans, and are much more used to a business culture of availability during office hours. Especially there's a bigger share of like b2b back office stuff in europe compared to like, restaurant POS systems.
3. Larger companies do seem more into follow the sun. A lot of the big tech in europe are subsidiaries of US companies, so if they're in Europe it means they've already opened one remote location, and therefore are more likely to have another (California, Europe, India is a super common arrangement)
Mind you, I interviewed for a Yahoo Mail job that would have included wearing a pager (back in '05). And I know it's pretty common - I've been fortunate to not have that be an issue. Hoping for another ~5 years at the current job until I can retire.