I believe you're a UK but no offense intended if you're not. As an actual american I only write about three or four checks per year, everything else is online.

We do pull and push.

Pulls are an unholy PITA to set up where you give them all kinds of personally identifiable information which they hopefully won't lose, then they make multiple couple cent deposits to your account, then you tell them what the amounts were and they tell the bank, which creates a certain relationship which in the Future is very historical trust based. So click here on your car insurance site to make your biannual car insurance payment exactly like the last 20 payments (well, slightly different amounts, but ...) Ditto the mortgage website, the electric bill, a couple others. Basically very long term relationships, I'm unlikely to just randomly stop paying the monopoly electricity provider. This is a direct acct to acct transfer.

Pushes are easy to set up but more of a pain to use on a monthly basis. No one has control over pushes other than yourself. You send money to a postal address, and who knows what they do on the back end, individual old fashioned checks or batch up or wire transfers who knows. This is more for credit cards or temporary less formal associations. You go to your bank website, tell them the postal address (they'll save it for later use) tell them how much, click send, off it goes.

Speaking generically, most USA people use credit cards or paypal or the zillions of small time competitors when someone wants money from them, and they interface with the bank for you. So Paypal can eat money directly out of my checking acct to send cash, up to certain limits. This is vaguely ATM like, sort of a web interface to a ATM. Or it just gets added to the CC balance. So it would be really weird for me to pay directly for gasoline or even food, I generally CC that, and then send one very large "push" bill payment from the bank to the CC per month.

So Americans mostly do electronic pushes, pulls, and aggregators online, although we do have checks for non-electronic people.

I write a check to the school district for book + other fees, like $50 per year per kid. Technically its illegal to demand payment for free public schools but the PTO spends it on "free" after school activities so its kinda a donation and I think we get our monies worth. Also my wife buys an organic grown fraction of a cow from a local farmer every year or so, and the butcher shop takes electronic for processing but the old school farmer still does paper checks. Some tradesmen (plumber, carpenter) only take old fashioned paper checks, although that is very rapidly changing as they all get smart phones. I switched to a CU probably 7 to 10 years ago and since then I've written a couple dozen checks total, I'd have to find it to verify because I keep it locked up.

Some really old people, like non-computational, obviously write a lot of checks. I have an elderly uncle who had to pay an extra bank fee for writing more than two dozen a month, which seems weird to me.

Poor people with serious legal / financial issues are unbanked and mostly go pure cash. There's a whole industry grown around ripping off those people when they try to interface semi-legally with the financial system. This is probably less than 1/4 the population. Like if you owe child support or a court judgment, all your electronic money will simply disappear, but not your cash, leading to some peculiar behaviors.