I don't know about three decades ago but this type of payment has been ubiquitous in the UK for at least two in the form of Direct Debit and widespread across

I don't know about three decades ago but this type of payment has been ubiquitous in the UK for at least two in the form of Direct Debit and widespread across Europe for years now via SEPA. It is not just much cheaper than card payments, it is also dramatically more reliable. If you lived in a parallel universe where all of these payment methods had emerged at once and you described a payment method so unreliable that people would actually give a name to the hack of retrying each failed charge automatically, they would think you were joking. Ironically, despite in theory having a more generous reversal policy to protect consumers from fraud, these direct payment methods are also much less likely to result in inappropriate reversals that harm legitimate merchants, at least in our experience. Perhaps this is because banks will typically only reverse in cases of real fraud whereas card chargebacks are widely abused to commit fraud themselves or applied inappropriately as a blanket measure after an event like a stolen or lost card, and the incentives favour granting the refunds even if the customer just says for the flimsiest of reasons that they want their money back.