While for me personally a 401-type retirement account would be ideal, I'm kind of glad we don't have this system in my country (the Netherlands) . Most companies are enrolled in a pension fund for their specific field and if they are, all workers have pension contributions taken from their wages automatically. In my case 3,5%. Only if this is not offered at your company you can put tax-free money in a retirement account.
The pension funds are professional investors and their stability is monitored by the national bank. They also have access to investments that you and I don't have, because they sit on billions and billions of €. For people who are totally not interested in investing or retirement (=far more people than you can imagine) this is great because they don't end up in poverty even they are old, even though they never paid attention to it.
It's not great if you want to FIRE because you can only access the money at retirement age but it's a good system for society overall.