I know you said you're in Europe. I lived there for a while.
Some companies label themselves as 4G, 5G, etc., but the reality is that just hopping onto a service or provider doesn't guarantee you'll get solid service or coverage.
When I lived in France one year, I was using "Free"—it was about 20 Euros a month. Service was great. I left Europe and lived there again some years later, and I used Free a second time—but the second time I used it was awful. I had to switch to a different service (Orange) the 2nd time I lived there.
The service you're getting may say 5G or whatever the latest and greatest is, but it's still reliant on coverage and signal. Without that, you're still at the mercy of whatever local towers are nearby.
I remember Europe having exceptionally good cell phone service almost everywhere. It was so incredibly cheap, too.
Witj Verizon in the USA... Expensive... Normally good service, without any issues. But in my apartment and at my job, I have to rely on Wifi to communicate. Their service is good everywhere else, just nonexistent at the places I'm at most.
A company might have 4G or 5G, but if the signals are weak, the signals are occasionally downgraded to something like LTE. LTE used to be very strong and reliable, but now it's a seemingly very weak service.
The difference in paying for telecommunication bills between the U.S. and Europe is also completely different. Europe has good coverage almost everywhere, but the U.S. has tons of dead zones where there's almost no signal at all.
Hotspotting is useful in a pinch, but your phone usually is not meant to be your connection to the internet, provided you have a single area where you live. Your hotspot isn't traditionally meant for live-service games from a console (satellites connections fluctuate anyway). It's primarily just another way to connect to the internet for lower-level operations. Besides, doesn't hotspotting put your phone under some decent pressure? I remember mine getting hot sometimes while I was hotspotting...
