I wouldn't be so quick to equate differences in personal anecdotes with stark country-level differences (though it's plausible that everything is worse in America as usual)

I grew up in a low income neighborhood in the Netherlands and many times saw people be utterly terrified of CPS. In many cases these were households where outside help could've been really useful, but even in the worst cases where heavy CPS involvement was the only option (real "take the child away" cases), the child's situation often unfortunately hardly got better, just different. In less intense cases CPS involvement often just seemed to thrust a compliance burden on households without offering much real support, mostly just leaving people feeling guilty and stigmatized. Overall still better for them to exist than not, and budget cuts and restructuring really hurt the situation later, but still an organization with very real odds of making the situation worse, sometimes catastrophically worse.