So I'm Russian, and punctuation in my language matters a lot, which is partly due to our relatively free word order. There are sentences where it's hard or even impossible to understand their meaning without properly placed commas and whatnot. Of course, many people online make mistakes in their posts or forego commas altogether, but it makes them noticeably less understandable. Several years of Russian lessons in school are almost entirely devoted to punctuation. Punctuation mistakes count as errors in your exam essays. And we have lots of free and reliable resources on it - detailed guides, a site where you can ask a specialist for free and so on.
By comparison, the only thing I got in English was a whooping one page in my CAE textbook, and half of it was devoted to obvious things like put a full stop at the end of a sentence, or a question mark if it's a question. I've tried to find some reliable resources that cover advanced stuff, but they're either contradictory, or use "go with your gut" a lot instead of rules, or aren't free. I guess, there's no uniform set of rules because there's British English, American English, Australian English and so on.
But what about Spanish punctuation then? Or what about languages that use a completely different script, like Arabic or Hebrew? I can only say for Japanese that, as far as I know, punctuation is still a rather new thing and thus, there's a lot of arbitrariness. I also don't remember ever seeing a colon (except for time like 4:05) or a semi-colon in manga or books, and on the whole it feels like Japanese doesn't rely on punctuation as much as western languages do.
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