> You never know how much you're going to pay in fees.
Indeed. People who say everything works fine because that one time they had zero issues have no idea what it's like to deal with EUR / JPY / USD / AED transfers on a semi-regular basis. If you do it all the time, you may have found something that works all the time. If you do it once, you may have been lucky. But if you do it two or three times a year, you're in for a world of hurt, surprise fees, delays, cancelled transfers, etc. You cannot have "not noticed this" or say "I never had any surprise".
Worse: if you're working with the EUR but outside the eurozone (like Andorra and Monaco, which both use the EUR but aren't in the EU) you can have very nasty surprises. You better read and re-read any fineprints because you sign any bank account opening because you can find yourself paying 2% + fixed fees + tax on the fees on every transfer to/from the country.
Very often all these are hidden from the consumers and the burden is put on the businesses. I was in Andorra, I bought a bike for my kid: seller was doing 5% discount if I was paying cash... And it's not to dodge taxes (taxes are maximum 10% there for any business): it's not to "cheat" 0.5% on the sale by not reporting it. It's because the banks/payment processors take a very heavy cut.
Now there may be solutions but it's something you have to actively look into. It's not just "I open a bank account in that country, another one in that country and then everything works magically".
Funnily enough: at some point using EUR->crypto then crypto->AED (just an example) may turn out to be cheaper than doing EUR->AED.