Mildly Infuriating

Precisely, thank you. I was going to post an image, but whenever I added the image when posting the post stalled. Fixed now.

In France, maybe other places in Europe, some parking spots require you to have a "parking disc" as we call it, set to your time of arrival.

Yeah. In some places they chalk the tires to track if the car has been sitting too long. It's not the drivers job to track that. Why should it be?

The parking disc commonly looks like this:

The sign that states times for free parking can look like this:
.

My parking disc is digital and once I set the current time and date it’s supposed to be a set-and-forget as it automatically sets the (rounded up) time to when I arrived:

This is what they look like in Germany

https://www.motoreport.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/needit-park-lite.jpg

This is the most common analogue design:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71KWo3Y8fIL._SL1500_.jpg

The automatic ones have to be approved to be legal, there is a limited set of models that are approved in different countries, and they’re recognizable. Plus, parking attendants can take pictures and see if the car is in the same position with a new time when they pass by an hour later.

However, there exist battery driven parking discs that look like normal manual ones, that you set the time manually and then it adjusts every half hour. These are illegal though, and you’ll get fined and possibly even charged legally for using them if discovered.

It’s also illegal to go back to your car every X hours to move the manual disc time forward if the car isn’t moved.

In large parts of Europe, the onus is on the car driver/owner to follow the parking rules, either the common street ones or the privately owned ones.

I can’t remember the exact time I parked any more, but let’s say I parked at 10:25. If I had a manual parking disc/timer, I would have set the time manually to 10:30. Then I would have been able to park for two hours from the time on my parking disc/timer.

My automatic timer had crept forward for some weeks, so when I parked it rounded off to one hour later, 11:30, which I didn’t think of to check.

When the parking attendant went by my car, he/she looked at the current time, and the time my parking disc/timer showed was one hour later than the current time. And as they don’t show date of parking, I was in the wrong for
a) having parked there the previous day, or
b) having set the time wrong on purpose, which is also a finable offense.

It showed let's say 12 o'clock when they arrived at 11 o'clock meaning they must have been there for 23 hours.
The tickets are not written up by robots but by someone checking the time on the parking disc.

Sometimes people manually set their parking discs a bit forward so that they have a bit more time but if they get checked in that time frame the ticket is even more expensive than if they overstayed an hour.