Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.

After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.

My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.

> who wants to reach the point where you find that out?

Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101

A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.

with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.

Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.

Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal