Germany is similar. Especially in more rural areas, a couple villages away people are going to have a hard time understanding you.

Though there's typically a common dialect variant everybody speaks, usually the one spoken by the largest city in the region.

E.g. every middle-franconian understands Nuremberg franconian dialect and is able to talk in a way they would understand.

Heck, Swiss German is like this lol.

My cofounder's wife, during a parents together at school, was "advised" by some of the mothers to not "hang around those" mothers because they're stranger folk. Turns out, they lived 1.5 miles away in the next village.

I'm American

My ear has just gotten to the point of noticing German dialects, and spotting the quizzical looks of other German/Austrian/Swiss people in the group

Fascinating. I feel like they had 1,000 years to resolve this

1000? Prussia dissolved only in 1947 and the nation state of Germany was reunified only in 1990.

In any case, communication technology (trains, TVs) is a greater determinant of dialect than government.

suboptimal outcome for sure

well, if you ignore the current country borders then "German" would encompass a large portion of Switzerland and the Netherlands. So, with that assumption, I would be surprised if Italian had more dialects than German.

Italian script doesn't use diacritics, though, so it's not the same kind of accent as the article talks about.

Italian script most definitely requires diacritics.

"è" (is) vs "e" (and)

"pero" (pear tree) vs "però" (but)

"perché" is the only correct one and "perche" and "perchè" do not exist

and so many other examples.

Oh huh, I've forgotten more Italian than I thought, thanks for the correction!