Your not towing anything with the smaller transits.
Even the smaller vans can tow 1.5t. I'll concede it's a lot less then a pickup can tow but this is not "nothing" and plenty practical for lots of use cases you'd have in any city.
And they suck in winter.
This is the Netherlands, not the Yukon. We don't have 5 foot deep snow on the roads in the Winter. In fact it's been years since we had any kind of snow at all. We just have a mild chill and mostly just rain.
The off-road/awd capability's of any vehicle are almost entirely irrelevant in the Netherlands for the overwhelming majority of people.
It was still sold until recently? That's pretty wild.