Yes, because handing over your card to a stranger is considered a fairly crazy thing to do in most countries other than the US, as cards require PIN entry for most transactions (which actually does meaningfully prevent in-person card fraud).

In the US, you simply have no choice if you want to eat in a restaurant, so people are used to it. I'd expect total skimming rates to be higher in the US, since magnetic stripe transactions have been phased out in effectively all other countries. People don't care because they don't directly pay for the resulting fraud out of pocket. As a society, of course everybody still pays for it.

> Largely it is the merchants who have to prove that there was no fraud

No, in-store, it's the issuing bank that's liable, even in the US (unless the card is PIN-preferring, which is usually only true for foreign cards).