QR codes can just be printed, by everybody with a printer. Designers don't need to think a lot about technical details, they just put the QR code into their layout and send it off to the printing press (or in fact the screen).
Additionally because QR Codes are optical, it doesn't matter if you stand 20 meters away from the billboard if the QR code is big enough, while with NFC you would have to come close.
Although I find the stupid implementations funny, I've seen ads pasted on cars, they'd have super dense QR code, but maybe be the size of your palm.. uhm, if the idea is for people stuck in traffic around you to see them, they need to have less pixels or be bigger. Besides the dense QR codes are not just some domain, but usually is some ad agency who wants to track how many times the code has been scanned and how many times they've redirected people to the real URL, so they can charge the owner for the service of... having a QR code.
Occasionally you'll see one on an ad or something... but the number of people who would ever scan it must be minuscule.
It's just not part of normal life here. At all.
(Employees scan codes on tickets for events or transportation though, very common, but I don't think those are technically in QR format usually.)
The only exception I can think of off-hand where scanning the codes on a phone is common here is scooter rentals. I doubt the average person on the street here would know how to scan a QR code they encountered in the wild (as opposed to app-specific codes).
They're very much in use, everywhere. I fail to see how I'd forget about them.
But without even reading the article I know that QR codes are only as powerful as the app that parses them. They can't do anything on their own, just convey a chunk of data to a reader.
I believe they caught on more than NFC because they require so little. Just a camera, which is already present in all devices. While NFC is a much bigger decision to implement since its field of use is much more restricted.