> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America

I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.

(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)