Anectodal, etc, but I could never get a chargeback in Europe. In the US it was always very easy.

In the EU I couldn't get a chargeback even when the company said they mistakenly charged me twice, and that I should do a chargeback.

I know that theoretically the law is on my side, but practically I found it to be a huge hassle in the EU.

I have had good chargeback experiences as well in the cases you name. I am talking about cases where it is clear where you are frauding the merchant which are still easy in the US. 3dsecure in most cases means you have to have coerced me AND have stolen my phone/token device. How would this warrant chargeback unless actually you did not receive your product and there is a clear trace of that. In this case indeed, you can chargeback. But not just randomly when you feel like it.

3dsecure is security theater, I hate it so much. It doesn't matter if you have 3dsecure, because a scammer can use your card on some site that doesn't use 3dsecure. All 3dsecure does is making it harder for me to pay to legitmate websites in the EU. But wait, more often than not I can't pay at all because (in my case) 3dsecure uses SMS, and SMS delivery is unreliable, I can't get SMS from my bank when I travel to the US, or even some when I travel to some other EU countries. For me, it doesn't work approximatively 50% of the time.

And of course, SMS 2FA is not secure at all. Now if there's fraud and the scammer used 3dsecure with spoofed SMS, good luck convinging the bank it wasn't you.

"But SMS is not the only option" you say, "other banks have better 2FA", actually, I use other banks too. And they have something insane for 2FA: https://lobste.rs/s/1cyltz/two_factor_authentication_now_ava....

If the site does not have 3dsecure then chargeback is easy...

And yes, agreed, SMS stinks. I have tokens for everything and insist on that. Unfortunately some banks now only have sms...

See my edit about hw tokens. To me hw tokens are bad, not only because of the UI/UX disaster explained in the link above, but because I have to have the damn thing with me. Also, batteries ran out while I was in the US for 4 months, and the bank would not send me a new one, I'd have to come get it in person. Thanks bank!

And chargeback was always impossible in my case. In the US I click a button in the webui, or call a phone number. In the EU, I had to come in person to the bank three times, and fill all kinds of forms, and in the end, I still didn't get my money back.

Seems you had bad luck but to me that still doesn't warrant free 'screw all merchants' card.