Last time I visited NL many shops (including Albert Heijn) only supported Maestro, so as a foreigner you effectively can't pay with Visa or Mastercard.

Not with Visa/Mastercard credit cards, but Visa/Mastercard debit cards work everywhere. In fact, my current main card is a Visa debit card (not Maestro or V-Pay, it has the same code format as a credit card and a CVC code, which my older Maestro/V-Pay cards didn't have).

This is one of the reasons why Garmin Pay is pretty useless here. Most banks only support it with credit cards and a lot of stores do not take credit card-based contactless payments (with some exceptions like e.g. Jumbo and Decathlon).

The reason is that debit cards have been the standard cards since the beginning. Nowadays more people have a credit card for online shopping outside the country, etc. But when I was young my dad had a credit card and that was fairly exceptional.