Sometimes. In USA they may require one check for parties of >N (where N can be 6). Some (fancy) places won't split at all. Then consumers juggle apps to square up the deal.
In your list it says 13 out of the 18 countries tipping is customary or expected. France and Spain are not among those, which tracks with my experience.
It's not a borderline case. People have trouble with the distinction between a judgement about a word overall, and a judgement about what a word will do to an HN thread. Also, people just like to gripe.
Yes, this is actually not unusual. People need food, water, shelter, and suchlike in order to survive, and so they exchange their labour for goods and services. Money is a helpful token now rather widely used in this bartering process.
I know it's quite common in the web development community to take a lot of freely provided code which took immense labour to write, and then stitch it together, in a way that requires very little skill or effort, in order to sell the result - but this isn't the norm in the world at large.
