“Personally I always found that ^] for various terminal commands was much more of a hassle (…)”
Yeah, tell me ’bout it. Back when I used Windows at work, a friend told me that instead of Ctrl ] one should press Ctrl ¨ – because on a regular Swedish keyboard, ¨ is on the same location that has ] on a US keyboard. (Not sure if this works with Linux/Mac, never tried there.)
Personally I always found that ^] for various terminal commands was much more of a hassle, to the point where it's easier to just close the terminal window.
Some Danes will just use a US keyboard layout, but that's not really as common as sites like HN will have you believe. In terms of programming it does make a little sense though. The 8 and 9 key is doing a lot of heavy lifting, Shift + 8 is (, Option + 8 is [ and Shift + Option + 8 is { and the matching close characters on 9.
There's not a lot of room for special characters on a Nordic keyboard, all most all of the require a modifier key. I don't know if that makes Nordic keyboard users more adverse to the use of these characters in commands and programming languages.