I think in theory B2 means something but i never met a B2 level French speaker who has jmpressed me. Myself included. Especially on vocab. And remember you may work like hell to pass that B2 exam with 50% then stop your studies. Use it or lose it as they say. And lets face it for whatever reason, good or bad, not many of us international types end up using it. And before you mention one i know there are exceptions. So and so who met a swiss girl ect. Wish it was different for us maternal English speakers. We are missing out big time. Others benefit by speaking back English to us. That said it is still totally worth doing the migros courses when you arrive here if they still exist. i met loads of people that way and promptly went to the pub with them to speak English with them.
The village I live in has few English speakers so most days I speak a bastard version of High German and dialect with some English words thrown in.
Have been here 27 years so people accept this quite well.
Anyway odd English words have a certain culture like using French in England.
There’s a world of difference between being fluent and being able to pass a test. I consider both myself and my wife to be fluent, though not of course native-level, but we run a business in French, deal with tax, planning, banking and tradespeople all in French, written and spoken, without problems. Oh, and most of our customers too. Almost never does anyone speak back to me in English if we’ve started in French. (Oh, I think the bank manager last time we renewed the mortgage near perfect English so we used that, but not because he felt we needed to).
BUT. I recently did an online test and it rated my an A1. I thought it was a ridiculous test, lost points of very esoteric issues like subjunctive and conditional tenses, spelling on a couple, as well as at least two or three where I would argue the toss that my answer was correct. I’d hope that an official test would be better, and would expect to score higher, but it goes to show the reality gap between test results and day to day fluency in a language.
I agree that the prep courses enable people to score one or two levels higher on the test than they actually are. This is perhaps the cause of the distorted perception of what these levels mean.