they could do like germany where most apartment/flat kitchens are bare --the renter needs to bring their own appliances and furnishings. this means fewer appliances and kitchen stuff gets mistreated by the renters since they own them. kinda sucks to move apartments though.
as to why... german renter/lessee culture prefers having their own stuff to give it a more homey feel, i guess.
It hugely sucks because things like fridges and stoves often need to fit the dedicated space in a kitchen exactly. The chances that your previous apartment and new apartment fit the same size appliances is virtually nil.
This is why it makes sense for them to just be part of the apartment.
I don't know what you mean by "mistreatment" -- anything in an apartment can be mistreated I suppose, it's not specific to appliances. If you damage anything, that comes out of your deposit. But I'm not really sure what there is specifically to damage about fridges and stoves? They get dirty and you can clean them. They don't generally require any super-special treatment.
The medieval French word (and English borrow-word) was immeubles - immovables. While it's not clear what these were to me, there is a distinction between buying furniture (meh, it's your stuff) and buying immeubles (which meant you were staying longterm).
As a non-German living in Germany, the German insistence on you buying your kitchen in a rental is really really stupid, and serves no purpose. Besides the schemes listed here, where the landlord tries to sell you the previous kitchen at full price, the old renter will do it too. If they're having you take over their contract, they have some choice in who the renter is, and will often condition their acceptance of your rental offer on taking their kitchen at full price or more. If you don't want it, someone else desperate will take it. There's also a robust marketplace of second hand kitchen appliances on FB marketplace, where the tenants tried to do the same thing or just generally got stuck with taking their kitchen, and now are trying to unload appliances that don't fit the new place. In Germany, its not just fridges. It's also the stove/oven combo sometimes, the dishwasher, and the lights and lightbulbs. It's a horrible inefficient system that just makes renting a nightmare, and keeps everyone in place because of the enormous hassle of moving (the standard 90 day notice period doesn't help either. Trying to line up a new lease and old one ending without significant overlap is also next to impossible. The German rental market is broken).
There is a scheme that is sometimes used by landlords in Germany in which an apartment is only rented out if the tenant agrees, before the rental contract is signed, to buy a fully fitted kitchen that is already installed — and usually at a price that is far from cheap. Otherwise, the prospective tenant does not get the lease. Given the current shortage of affordable housing in Germany, this puts the prospective tenant under considerable pressure to buy the kitchen from the landlord.
The landlord is fully aware that when the tenant eventually moves out, the landlord can require the tenant to take the kitchen with them — after all, it is the tenant’s property, not the landlord’s. The landlord can therefore demand that the outgoing tenant removes the kitchen. This again puts the tenant under pressure, because fully fitted kitchens very rarely fit into a new apartment.
At that point, the landlord can make an offer to buy the kitchen back from the departing tenant so that it can remain in place — but the purchase price is then only a fraction of what the tenant originally had to pay the landlord when moving in.
In this way, the landlord can indirectly force one tenant after another to buy the kitchen and later sell it back.
I've lived in Germany for four decades with plenty of moving around, and have yet to move into a place where a kitchen was not either provided or left there from the previous tenant (sometimes with a more symbolic compensation; it's not worth to rip it out since it often only fits that particular place anyway so there is pressure to give it away cheaply).
That's your story. Here's mine. My daughter moved out of an apartment in Hamburg. The fridges, washing machines, beds or whatever I can understand. They are designed to be installed after the building is complete.
What blew me away was being forced to remove the ceiling lights, and leaving the live wires dangling down. Don't underestimate the difficulty of doing this for someone who has to do it after working hours. You switch off the power of course, which leaves you in total darkness. Naturally I had not thought of that little complication beforehand.
as to why... german renter/lessee culture prefers having their own stuff to give it a more homey feel, i guess.