I was using Eau Claire as an example... Eau Claire itself has a population of somewhere between 68,000 and 70,000 depending on when the count was done. 70 is a nice round number. Eau Claire is in Eau Claire County which has a total population of 105,000 (2/3 the population is in the city) an area of 645 square miles (1670 square kilometers) and the population density for the county is 165 people/square mile (64/ square kilometer).
We head to Assen, and that has a population of 68,000 and move up to the province of Drenthe... that has a land area of 2634 square kilometers (1017 square miles), a total population of 493,000 (nearly 5x the population of the county of Eau Claire) and a population density of 188/square kilometer (490/ square mile).
This is, where I believe, things get different when doing these comparisons. The city of Eau Claire needs to be built for the people who aren't in the city (even though most live in the city). Its a 90 minute drive there before you get to Minneapolis or if you head in the other direction, its 90 minutes before you get to Wausau (population 40,000).
In Drenthe, there probably isn't any place where you need are 50 miles from the nearest hardware store or grocery store of reasonable size (according to Google Maps you can drive from one end of the province to the other in under an hour). Assen to Groningen (p. 200,000) is 1/3 the distance of Eau Claire to Minneapolis.
With that much higher of a population density it makes a lot more sense to optimize for more local transportation.
If we took a Voronoi chart based on cities with a population of more than... 40,000 and overlaid that on Wisconsin and the Netherlands I am fairly sure that the area that each city reaches to is larger in Wisconsin and that the population that area is larger - that there's a lot more rural population in Wisconsin.
The consequence of that is that the cities at the centers of each area need to be designed primarily with distance travel in mind rather than local travel.
The places where those areas are smaller because the cities are more closely packed (the large metro areas on the coasts in particular) it is more feasible to invest in local transportation options because that citywide be serving a higher portion of local population rather than the "out of town".
In terms of investment in bicycle infrastructure - it is those places that will have the greatest return - like Portland and Seattle.
Trying to redesign Eau Claire or Wausau for micro mobility means that population outside of the urban area is very poorly served by the city.