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Wow. I live within the USA snowbelt, but studded tires are pretty uncommon outside remote undeveloped areas and mountainous areas. Studless (or unstudded, studdable) winter tires are very common in the winter. Poor or clueless people or those who don't drive much will use all-season year-round. Studded (and obviously even winter) tires are very much a regional thing, but studded tires do very much eat the roads and are regulated or banned on many roads.

We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.

What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.