I live in PAL country so yeah it is the default for what you find. It is also not necessarily that bad for some things and many an asterisk can be found to the "inferior" aspect so often quoted.
Baseline for those new to it all.
Today games are decoupled from the underlying hardware in many ways. Back in the day however the console makers (mostly based in Japan and the US) tied things to the TV refresh standard (60 fields per second in most things claiming to be NTSC, and 50 fields per second in most things claiming to be PAL, we will skip SECAM, the USSR and the oddities in Brazil for today).
PAL is a higher resolution but very little took advantage of it. Indeed "just add black bars to make up the effective resolution" was part of the problem faced by would be PAL enjoyers.
One of the other "fixes" for the frame rate difference (which the whole console workflow revolves around updating frames at a fixed timeline) for PAL was to slow things down. 60fields/frames to 50 being actually quite a noticeable leap (about 13%) compared to similar speedups done from FILM to PAL (24 frames per second to 25 for PAL) and games are not really an option for a pulldown if you are more familiar with old video (why some old films in old NTSC look a bit juddery). The alternative was to make 60PAL (most TVs from the early 90s onwards in PAL world supporting it, would be mostly the Gamecube before we saw that used commonly in anger though) output or spend a long time redoing all the timings so they matched.
Secondary to this is Europe has a lot of languages and not everybody speaks English (basically nobody speaking Japanese) so you as the hypothetical game publisher then have 5 languages (US English is different to UK English, though not so often observed) in addition to all the requirements to publish (boxart in certain languages, different censorship rules depending upon where you go -- German being the more notable if you are going to have blood and/or Nazis and imagery thereof in your game).
To that end Europe often had to wait sometimes years to get versions of a game, and in many cases missed it entirely (especially a lot of the late stage games made after the next console had come out and ascended to dominance, and even if it did come out it might have been a lot later and thus a lot more costly today as so few of the exist).
Of course said wait time and already possibly employing big boy coders means many times the PAL country stuff got bug fixes, less censorship (Nintendo largely imagined the parody level hyper fundamentalist evangelical Christian for their censorship policies, Europe cared far less as religion was pretty much dead by then), possibly a better translation (Nintendo of America also assumed everybody was a redneck that would react violently to anything not cheeseburgers and nasty
beer honestly it is really soda guv), possibly dodging the American easy mode alterations and much more besides.
You also had some games built to run with PAL hardware and take advantage of its perks and timings which in turn get cropped and sped up needlessly to work on NTSC systems for their ports. You may also find otherwise Japan only titles released in PAL world (I am mostly familiar with the GBA and DS offerings here).
Additional again, though edges get very fuzzy, is this policy is mostly only one to really trouble the 8 and 16 bit TV consoles from Sega and Nintendo. Does not matter for handhelds for the most part (though some of the perks do apply). To that end Amiga, Commodore 64 and such from the unquestionably retro era can be exceptions outright in this. If retro now speaks to the PS1, N64 and beyond it gets even more fuzzy. There are still exceptions of inferior PAL ports, even more so if you push things to the limit and try for higher resolutions and whatnot which some of those can pull off in certain games with exotic leads and hardware combinations* (see Gran Turismo multi screen).
Some also note button conventions (in playstation layout for Japan X is often cancel where O is confirm, opposite in much of the rest of the world). At that point that is more convention than anything drastic though and we possibly then have to speak about boxart which is its own rabbit hole starting with stuff like the PS1 second run games in Europe are grey label where the US ones are hideous bright lime green. You might also get different images for the boxart, for my money if differences arise the European versions generally being better by dint of having a proper artist do something rather than babby's first
photoshop Corel photopaint project that seems to characterise any times the Americans get tasked with doing something like that.
*the PAL gamecube never having a digital out, the PAL xbox similarly not getting component cables so you have to import them/make them and flash your xbox to handle them (see enigmah video mode switcher) to in turn use high resolution homebrew and games.
At this point however I have been playing with emulators and ROM sets for so long (any hacks also generally being for the NTSC versions, though there are some notable exceptions in handhelds) that I have no real timing memory of PAL versions I might have played growing up (and I have been playing emulators since the early PS1 era
https://gbatemp.net/threads/what-was-your-first-formative-emulator-experience.620486/ ).
JM 
