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If I'm not mistaken this is pretty universal outside of the US (and maybe the UK).

Going by the Wikipedia article and included map, use of comma versus period as decimal separators is roughly an even split:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.svg

Seems geographically split, but I wonder what is the actual population split is. Most of the top 10 population countries use the decimal separator. Only Brazil, Russia and Indonesia don't.

Maybe someone with a CSV of the world populations and a CSV of the countries broken down by their separator can do that comparison.

There's definitely a big distribution disparity. 11 of the 15 most populous countries use the period for decimals.

Most of Europe is in the fat long tail though, as those countries are counted individually.

You are mistaken. Probably more countries overall use a decimal comma, but the decimal point is used as convention in many countries, including China, India, Nigeria and the Philippines.

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