how come there is no "appearance" button on the English wikipedia?
The "appearance" button seen on Dutch wikipedia is able to change the SIZE of the font (text) and the width of the article. This is extremely nice to have, but it's not there on any English article...
It does have it but its in the settings menu instead. I believe the different language versions of Wikipedia are maintained by different groups so that's probably why.
this settings page does not exist on desktop, only on the mobile version. If I go to en.m.wikipedia.org I can see it on desktop, but it's not on en.wikipedia.org. It also does not save settings from mobile version to desktop version...
Technically these kinds of things are decided by the Wikimedia Foundation but they'll usually not do things that the editing community of the local wiki doesn't want.
In 2014 the WMF forced a new software feature (Media Viewer) on all wikis and enforced this by "superprotecting" the JavaScript on the German-language Wikipedia so local admins (who at one point even blocked the Deputy Director of the WMF from editing) couldn't disable the new media viewer. The WMF doesn't really want these kinds of constitutional crises to happen again.
Update: I checked and apparently they pronunciation is significantly different so that he doesn't in fact just go around bragging about how big he is 😆
Maybe it's a default feature for all non-English languages to account for potential writing system differences? May not make as much a difference for other languages using the Latin alphabet, but maybe for East Asian scripts or Arabic or Hindi etc., they don't want to assume the default layout is as readable as it is for English?
well the english wiki does have the wide layout option through the square button on the bottom left, ever since the new layout revamp. Just not the font size option.
using the browser zoom makes the layout narrower again, as if it's actively trying to reverse the wide layout by the button in the bottom right. It makes the page very weird looking. Just far from ideal.
EDIT: it's also very inconvenient since my browser saves the zoom level per website (not between en.wikipedia and nl.wikipedia) so the zoom would always be off when going from one article to one in the other language.