US mountains are consistently pushing towards the resort model, teaming up on season passes and turning mountains into little Disneylands. The season passes are very cheap considering what you get. They haven't gone up all that much in the last 20 years relatively while day passes have quadrupled.
I think another big difference has to be the way Europe considers risk and responsibility on the mountain versus the way the US mountains do. The US does way more maintenance on the mountain and accepts essentially zero unmitigated risk to skiers. If there is any risk of an inbounds avalanche, it's closed and you'll get your pass pulled if you duck the rope. In Europe, skiing off the run at all is often an "at your own risk" kind of thing, often there is no rope. Seeing people in the lift line with Airbags is common, even though they are riding the lifts all day. Consider La Vallee Blanche in Chamonix and you get the idea. That would NEVER be a thing at a normal US resort, it's an insurance companies nightmare. You can fall down a crevasse essentially anywhere down that "run", which is really lift accessible, glaciated backcountry skiing. If you don't make it down before the lift closes, sorry, you are now a mountaineer trying to get back to civilization. In the US, if it's on the map then people assume they are safe. You can easily die just walking down from Agui du Midi and taking a bad slip.
In Europe I always ski with my skins/beacon/shovel/etc. because it is not unreasonable to inadvertently end up somewhere sketchy or have to skin back up as conditions worsen or it becomes obvious that the lift at the bottom actually isn't open that day....oops. At Chamonix I always went skiing with my climbing harness and crevasse rescue gear. There are runs at Chamonix where you can ski down a red (blue) run and on the side there is a 2000 foot cliff or where you'll see cracks in the snow from the crevasses below. Very fun, but definitely requires knowledge and self reliance that my $50 ski pass did not include. If you wanted insurance, you had to add it to your pass every day.