At one company, I was technically on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week for over ten years. Did I get called that often? No. Did I get called at the worst possible moments? Yes.
That's not a problem with the concept of being oncall. That's an entirely different problem that's not technical nor operational not industry-specific.
Isn’t the fact that you receive calls seldomly, but at the worst possible moment literally the core problem of being oncall?
And it’s certainly industry-specific. Some doctors have this, firefighters—and software engineers. Contrary to the first two, they usually don’t save lives, but revenue though.
That is not common in Europe. Generous compensation and additional time off is quite typical for engineers handling on-call burdens.