I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality.
It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it.
If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions.
Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are expired domains that have been bought.
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently.
On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago.
It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
For example if you check havfruen4220.dk on archive.org you can see that it appears to have been a legitimate business website before. https://web.archive.org/web/20181126203158/https://havfruen4...
How do they rank so well?
I've checked the domain on ahref and it has almost no backlinks. But if you look closely you will see that all the results that rank very well have been added very recently. On the screenshots in the article you can see things like "for 2 timer siden" which means 2 hours ago. It looks like google is ranking pages that have a very recent publishing date higher.
Edit: Here is what the content of such a site looks like: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bk0VsM...