The Economist about Germany's economy: "a national business model build in part on cheap energy from one autocracy and abundant demand from another (China) faces a severe test". Combine the cutting off from Russian gas with shutting down all nuclear power plants, and you do have something like a collapse of the economy, at least a significant decline in its industrial output.
Point of the author being, higher gas prices can't be directly compared between economies and all that so shouldn't be used to paint EEA members as these economic hellscapes (which always get a chuckle from me), though sudden and severe upward or downward movements could hint at a wider trend.
As someone from one of the DACH countries, it was honestly a nice read and I get their points on concepts like Überweisung, though I will say, if the author was surprised how one opens a Ritter Sport, they should take a look at the official way to open Haribo [1]. Then there is Mannerschnitte [2]. Also, yes, publicly founded mental health care requires significant improvements.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0511/how-gas-pri...
Yes but that's about industrial (natural gas) prices, not consumer (natural gas) prices. They can be very different.
> with shutting down all nuclear power plants
With shutting down the last 3 (I think) nuclear power plants. The nuclear shutdown process started in 2000. They had plenty of time to invest in enough replacement capacity, but didn't. And it was quite clear at least since 2009 that Russia is not a serious partner, so again, they had plenty of time, and did nothing.