I've toured quite a bit in Europe but don't have a clear recollection - tons of roadies, tons of utilitarian bikes, relatively few touring bikes.
1.
AFAIK, until recently, mainland retailers weren't selling touring bikes. The closer design other than boutique was called trekking, my understanding being that it wasn't a road bike nor a mountain bike. I don't know what trekking was referring to exactly, it would take a local to explain. But it certainly wasn't bikes meant for Mongolia.
2. Décathlon, probably the largest sport equipment retsiler in Europe, doesn't sell "vélo de tourisme" on its (French) site. No trekking either. Some odd categories including "long distance". (Flat bars)
3. Bike24 and Rosebikes (German online retailers) have recently dropped the trekking category. Rosebikes lists only 2 models of touring bikes (drop bars). Whereas bike24 has literally hundreds of touring variants (all flat bars as far as my eye can see).
4. More to the core - I got into touring a few years ago, when the LHT was the undisputed mid-range reference. I didn't want to use thumbies or some other workaround popular at the time. So I went butterfly (now flat with backsweep). Rapid fire shifters on a 3x10 mountain group are, for me, excellent. Even if brifters could be made to work on an XT groupset I wouldn't switch.
But the industry is moving forward with interesting 1x12 groups. Being content with my setup I didn't look into this enough to really understand the implications but I am under the impression that they are for MTB setups, i.e. flat bars.
Trying to coerce a MTB groupset to work with dropbars might be where the cultural difference occurs.