Reminder to all commenters that Europe is not a single homogeneous country and somewhat diverse in various things, including payments and finance. Credit cards are definitely a thing in many European countries.
In my corner of the world, credit cards were for buying stuff on the internet and travelling outside the EU. Now the net has evelved enough to accept our normal means of payment. I always feel insecure when using a credit card.
Pretty much all of the EU had Visa- and Mastercard-branded debit cards since the turn of the millennium, so one has been able to buy stuff from the net and travel abroad without use of a credit card for decades now.
As an outsider: which countries lean which way? I'm curious how things trend where and I didn't even really know that debit was used by a majority in certain places (Countries? Regions? Historical based delimiters?).
Germany is very debit-card oriented (with no interest of switching). The Netherlands seems similar. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are also mostly debit-card oriented, but people seem more open to switching to credit cards (if they can get one - especially the younger generation).
Ireland and the U.K. seem much more credit-card oriented than rest of Europe. Turkey is also very CC oriented (kinda strange - was not expecting that).
In the UK people predominantly use debit cards but credit cards are widely available. Everyone gets a debit card with any current account (i.e. non-savings account). In March this year there were 2.3 billion debit card transactions vs 400 million credit card transactions according to this:
It used to be like that in Germany, it changed quite a bit. My debit card now is refused more often than my master card when I’m in Germany. I do tend to stay in large cities and not in the country side though, so my perspective is not a statistic.
But it definitely changed massively during Covid. Before Covid shops refusing _any_ card where still common (again, large cities is my spectrum) and debit card were accepted vastly more often than credit card.
You are of course free to extrapolate your experience from a single European country to the whole continent, but it's still not a coherent argument for or against anything.