I get where the author comes from, but this isn’t a skill issue. Of course Europe has all the expertise and access to hardware it would need, but we have a political class that ideologically deeply committed to neoliberalism, meaning they will always prefer a public tender with competing private enterprises over a state run and owned utility.

The problem is that the way the US providers have cornered the market, and the overly bureocratic tender procedures, you end up with only a few eligible bids from the three US firms and a few others like T-Systems, that have such a bad track record of actually delivering working solutions that no one interested in something other than a future board position with them will ever choose these companies.

In my experience using AI for that replaces legthy documentation searches with reading lengthy AI output that turns out to be full of halucinations. Net time saved usually negative.

As others have mentioned there are ssh keys and generally you can and should of course use a password manager.

However there is IMHO a huge blindspot of people using only SSH keys to long in, and that is that your day-to-day dev PC is actually more likely to be compromised in some way than the server that only runs specific, relatively well defined applications and overall just has less attack surface. And the ssh keys on your dev PC are really not very securely stored and thus quite easily compromised.

Hardware keys are of course a better solution, but I would personally recommend to use a 2FA solution that prevents access even when one factor (ssh keys or passwords) is compromised.

For some other countries, I suspect they only do it to inconvenience German travellers as a fuck you for Germany pushing the same shit onto them.