That’s a pretty sweeping generalization. In the European university that I went to, CS students definitely didn’t have to write anything longer than long-form exam questions until the bachelor’s thesis.

But less sweeping than the parent who generalized to "most universities". I think it was a long time since you went to university and times have changed.

That's probably true. It was definitely very unoptimal for students to not have practiced writing scientific text much if at all, and suddenly having to write twenty pages worth of it for their BSc. (More recently I did study another STEM subject for a bit and noticed that there was definitely more essay writing involved!)

Not really for me in Poland - thesis was the only thing we had to write in a technical way.