> This is because in the US, anyone can pull money out of your account with only the ACH numbers; which is an insane design

That’s the default for at least Germany and SWIFT, too. You can ask your bank to disable this, but that means losing the pull functionality completely; I think some banks have an interface to whitelist individually, but the majority doesn’t.

It can become a problem especially when you list your account number publicly somewhere for payments or donations: somebody will eventually use that account number to pay for random stuff. You’re contractually obliged to check your bank statements and ask for a (free) chargeback within a certain period of time (some weeks?).

At our projects, we solve this by having a separate “public“ bank account for incoming donations that blocks pulls, and a much less public one for pulls.

Apart from this use case, abuse seems to be rare enough that banks typically don’t expose the functionality to disable but only do it manually when asked specifically. I doubt most people even know they could.