The situation isn't entirely terrible in Germany, but extremely variable depending on your location. I have 1Gbit for 40 EUR per month, but there are certainly places that aren't even remote that get no reasonable broadband.
That could be an excuse if you ignore the fact that the terrible service is not limited to rural regions in the US. It's often really expensive and slow even in places that are packed with people.
And in some places, even big cities, people don't even have a choice as there's only company.
Why does that excuse America? The continent of Europe is also huge. It isn’t like this stuff is installed by one solitary overworked technician going house-to-house, big countries (and regions) can employ more people to do more work, and can raise more money from more customers.
That being said, they've also done a pretty good job in managing that money (which is rare for natural resource rich countries).
In the US, on the other hand, remote places are a lot more inhabitable. There are just more remote towns in the US, with more people owning more land and being spread out more as a result.
Of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that some dense towns in the US a few miles from a major city still have to deal with shitty broadband because no ISP is willing to invest in hooking them up to FttH. On average, though, the US will probably do worse than Norway for the foreseeable future because of the difference in where and how people live.
But yeah the bigger issue is that often even in urban or suburban areas, the internet is still bad.