There are apps like Buienradar that literally track and predict rain block by block with high accuracy.

And every time when people would mention weather they would open the app to see if rain is coming in their particular location.

I think it's due to peculiarity of Dutch weather: you could have rain literally 100 meters away from you, but not where you're standing. So usual "weather in the general region of where you are" are probably wildly inaccurate

Weather radars exist in most of Europe, including all of Western Europe. What's missing is somebody actually getting that data (which is not open in all countries) and feeding it into a short-term precipitation prediction model like Dark Sky (now Apple) does in a few regions.

Currently, in regions where it's not available, I just do that manually: Look the rain radar data for the last hour or so and extrapolate linearly based on wind direction. You'll miss rain that's just starting or stopping or sudden changes in wind direction, but it's much better than what many apps offer.