I see I'm interested in the differences of US vs European (continental, e.g. German) system here and to what extent all the American blog posts and comment threads are applicable here.

In Germany it's not considered grad "school", you're a full time "scientific employee" employed by the state and on a somewhat different plane of bureaucracic existence you're also a "doctoral candidate". The pay gap between academia and industry is also much smaller. It surely exists, but a scientific employee gets about 45k eur gross per year. Straight out of a masters it's typically 55-65k, or if you're really good maybe 75 (roughly) .

And I know people who dropped out and found a job without issues. In whst world does it not count as experience that you've mentored masters and bachelor students, probably took part in industry cooperation, traveled the world for conferences and gave talks, did in-house miscellaneous IT work, like you would at a startup.

It's really hard to compare an American PhD student straight out of bachelor's in medieval philosoohy of religion vs a doctoral candidate after a masters in Germany researching, say, machine learning for energy efficiency.