While lots of professionals speak English more or less well, what is telling to me and a big indicator that the situation does not look as good as some people want to believe is the fact that there is hardly any English-language cinema or movies/series (on TV).
Even where I am, a major German city, there is the one huge cinema complex (10 cinemas) that only shows 2 or 3 English language movies - in their smallest rooms and with less than 10% of seats taken. Every single movie and TV series gets German speakers for this market.
I can't say how reliable of an indicator this is, but I think given that this stuff (TV and cinema) still is a huge part of daily mass entertainment the fact that those offering the (often originally US-made) material choose to spend a lot of effort creating a German voice track pretty much without exception probably is significant.
Germany is big enough, both population- and business-wise, to not have to lean nearly as much on English compared to smaller countries.
You also see this in book translations. Here in Denmark, the choice is sometimes rather limited (outside of bestsellers) and the translation quality suffers. Compare this to Germany, where the market is significantly larger, so more more and higher quality translations are available.
I'm Danish and my girlfriend is German, and I definitely notice the difference whenever I visit her family in Baden-Württemberg.
I also noticed it while I was studying. Technical documentation was usually only available in English and German. When you have a population of >80 million people, there is a large incentive for producing native language products.
As a consequence, a lot of Germans over a certain age simply do not speak English very well, or at all.
While lots of professionals speak English more or less well, what is telling to me and a big indicator that the situation does not look as good as some people want to believe is the fact that there is hardly any English-language cinema or movies/series (on TV).
Even where I am, a major German city, there is the one huge cinema complex (10 cinemas) that only shows 2 or 3 English language movies - in their smallest rooms and with less than 10% of seats taken. Every single movie and TV series gets German speakers for this market.
I can't say how reliable of an indicator this is, but I think given that this stuff (TV and cinema) still is a huge part of daily mass entertainment the fact that those offering the (often originally US-made) material choose to spend a lot of effort creating a German voice track pretty much without exception probably is significant.