> English is just as Germanic as German is.

Well yes and no. English generally diverged much more from the common ancestor than pretty much every other Germanic language.

Yeah other examples like Maltese which is technically an Arabic dialect but with half the vocabularies coming from Romance/Italian languages.

English has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.