German is a bit of a special case. I'm not German, just a learner of the language, but I've noticed they often change the perfekt tense into präteritum. I assume this is because it tends to be shorter than the more commonly spoken perfect tense and is, of course, understandable for Germans, but not so great for language learners.

I mostly watch native German content if I can, not dubbed. There might be additional oddities that you run into with the dubbing for the reasons you mention.