In the US you have several legal safeguards that are not provided by debit cards. Fraud liability limitations, chargebacks, and so on.

You can still implement “if I can’t afford something, I don’t buy it” with a cc. I pay mine off every month so it’s financially the same s a debit card but use a premium card for its purchase benefits.

If you shop at places where many customers user credit cards, and those places don't change an extra credit card processing fee to customers, then you are effectively paying for those credit card fees whether or not you use one.

Opting out doesn't save you from those costs.

If you are traveling and need to rent a car in the airport - sometimes it is not possible to do without credit card. Otherwise you don't need a credit card.

Try to pay for SaaS online. Tons of them accept nothing but credit cards; and then some of them accept direct withdrawals from bank account but it takes days to verify. Services using Stripe seems to be the worst at this. (I’ve never carried a credit card balance my whole life.)

Whole Europe does this.

I never understood why whole nation wants to live in debt just to have one extra month of cash flow (which they’ll probably squander soon).

Honorable but foolish. You could effectively get a discount and still use it the same way as your debit card.

I assume you've somehow gotten access to stable housing though via that bank account (possibly a home loan, or something else), or accessed a large line of credit before 'modern' credit scoring came into play (FICO scores and the Big Three).

I see many commercials for local banking up here that pulls out 30-40+ year members of the banks boasting about the prosperity the bank provided them, but at the same time, when they'd walked into the bank back in the day A Guy just said "yeah he's good for it" and wrote out the loans they needed.

You can't opt out of the modern credit scoring system and if you fuck it up even once with a bad line item you're out of the running for quite a few things and become virtually poor.

I’ll never understand this credit card debt thing... and why should businesses eat the credit card commission cost? Is it 5%? You pay for it, why should I?