German: es regnet French: Il pluet
I don't see why English is special here.
French is descended from Latin, which is "pro-drop" in the sense that you'd drop the "dummy subject" and simply write "pluit." Later, Old French, like English, lost most of its cases. Because of that, many word endings started sounding very similar (a problem known as "agreement syncretization"). The pro-drop "null" subject disappears in the record roughly as that happens, presumably to help disambiguate.
This is an entirely different path than English took, and it's also not a path any other Romance language took. Spanish isn't even subject-prominent. It fully allows the "null" construction, e.g., "llueve", which literally is just "rains."
The rain is not magical, the environment is producing it. The environment is raining. It's raining outside means the environment is producing rain outside.
Who could possibly confuse that as lacking a subject.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-linguisti...
I guess the author means in contrast to some cases like "Pluvas" in Esperanto, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOBkKcbJUAE for a nice employ of it.
Italian, Spanish and Latin (for example) can generally avoid to express explicitly the subject in a dedicated pronoun, as the verb already encode the it through specific flection. In contrast in French and German only in imperative tense one can formally make such an ellipsis (colloquially of course one can encounter more nuances).
So nothing exceptionnal
In Ukrainian it’s «дощить» (from “дощ” — rain) — the form of the word tells you its function in the sentence. Same happens in other Slavic languages: Polish, Belarusian, Slovakian.
Latin languages rely on the order of words to explain their function. So much so, English speakers don’t say “blue big ball” in German, time before place is mandated.
One word (rains) is the full sentence. Because nothing else needs to be said.