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Europe isn’t a monolith and some countries are weird about cards. Here’s two examples.

In Germany, cash is strongly preferred or was the last time I was there a few years ago.

In Norway, cash is nigh nonexistent.

Don’t mistake Germany as representative of the median European country when it comes to card transactions.

Trite comment. Debit/credit cards never took off in Germany because everyone had a Giro card that worked perfectly well for cashless payments. And for online payments, PayPal filled the gap quick enough. The average German saw no reason to request a Visa/MasterCard from their bank for a heavy fee when PayPal did the job. That's also the difference: Germany never had the "Here, have a free credit card" culture.

A Giro card is a debit card.

With a more benevolent reading of my comment you could have seen that I do consider them equivalent for cashless local payments. My first sentence was meant as "[American] debit/credit cards". This doesn't invalidate anything I said.

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