Climate and terrain aren't that big a deal. Single biggest impediment to cycling is the how likely people are to be maimed or killed by drivers.
From the article:
"VeiligheidNL estimates that there were actually some 80,000 injuries of which 50,000 were serious."
And, of course, the idea of biking and the reality of it are quite different things:
https://www.bikelaw.com/2019/05/amsterdam-not-cycling-paradi...
I love how people tend to have this impulse to reduce reality to a single variable: Bikes = human power = exercise = good.
Reality is a complex multivariate problem. When you look at more variables you often discover something quite different than the assumption borne out of that single variable fantasy.
> Often a faster biker would pass within millimeters to get by me as I pedaled in an already narrow bike lane.
This is the number one thing I hate about mixing sidewalks with bike paths, but it appears it's also an issue on the latter.
Anyway this figure representing the fraction of trips done by bike in the Netherlands is interesting in context:
https://www2.deloitte.com/xe/en/insights/focus/future-of-mob...
Looking at the modal split for Amsterdam and Rotterdam, people still drive cars as much as in other European cities, it's just that cycling has replaced walking and public transport.
Frankly I don't see the benefit here.
Cars are a local maximum of utility that doesn't require much coordination or planning. They took advantage of pre-existing public roads and then crowded out all other road users, and subsequent roads were simpler to design and plan for cars than for mixed use with other road users.