Amazon is doing its own fintech play here, with heavy investments into Amazon Pay, Amazon Credit cards, and more. None of that seems to be driven via Stripe, but other local partners and banks instead.
SEPA's equivalent in the US is ACH, and in recent years ACH (which is a much older system) has mostly closed the gap with SEPA. Also, SEPA Instant exists, but not all banks are guaranteed to support it - as of even just a few months ago, many popular banks don't support it, which means that using SEPA reduces to ACH (in terms of payout settlement and information flow at POS).
Europe also has additional country-specific methods, so you can lean on (e.g.) iDEAL or or BACS if you know you're primarily dealing with Dutch or British customers, but that's not going to help you if you need seamless use across Europe.
ACH just never took off culturally in the US as a popular payment scheme - in part because of the easy availability of credit cards, which are usually free to the consumer and provide additional protections (such as chargebacks) that both ACH and SEPA lack. By contrast, credit card adoption is historically much lower in Europe (especially when segmented by country), so it makes sense that SEPA, for all its drawbacks, would catch on as a more popular method.
Of course, all of these pale in comparison to India's payment schemes, which are light-years ahead.
A) You have to initiate a transfer at your bank, there's no way to use ACH independently as a consumer without a commerce setup or relying on a 3rd party (like Zelle).
B) There's no confirmation step. If someone has your Account Number and Routing Number and does have a commerce setup, they can debit your account at any time.
That's actually not true - it appears that way because in practice ACH is only used in corner cases in the US, but it is absolutely possible.
> There's no confirmation step. If someone has your Account Number and Routing Number and does have a commerce setup, they can debit your account at any time.
...I have bad news for you about what the SEPA standards require!