Signatures are silly. They're hard to verify, and easy to forge. And my own personal signature has degraded over the years; I can write my autograph twice, and although they both look to me like my signature, they no longer look like the same signature.

So I can understand why nobody any longer wants to have to verify signatures.

Most people that ask me for a signature (usually deliverymen) don't care what I scrawl on their device; it's usually not even an attempt at a signature, it's just the simplest <squiggle> I can manage on those awful devices.

You at least have a PIN with your cc. In the US, it's signature or...nothing. Almost everywhere it's a tap or insert the chip. Still a mag stripe swipe in a few places but that's becoming more rare.

You described the US (regarding not signing, you are mistaken about the signature aspect). Most places stopped accepting signatures several years ago. Card readers are almost always 'insert' except in the very rare case where a card doesn't have a chip. Tap and pay is not common, however tap and pay is more common than signing something (in the US companies have been resisting tap and pay due to higher transactional rates). I haven't signed for a transaction outside of a restaurant across 17 states and 4 years. As I mentioned above, the last place I did sign for a transaction was in Canada.

Still no PIN as in the UK and Europe (and maybe most of the rest of the world, though). If you steal a chip card in the USA, you can use it. Not so elsewhere.

Every store I have been to in the last few months is tap to pay. It really seems to have exploded in popularity in 2022.

That's not quite true. I have a USA issued corporate card from Citibank which has a PIN. It only gets requested on rare occasions though, typically at automated terminals.

http://www.citi.com/chipandpin (note, pdf link)