Historically it's mostly fucked up because of the Kommunist years, as well as the border changes with the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war(s). But also now for other reasons.
Well I mean as a expat for lack of a better term (I have my own development company and work from home for mostly US based clients) I am in a privilaged possition of having a income several orders of magnitude higher than the national median, so it's not like I'm experiencing living like a "true Romanian", even my wife (who's Romanian) comes from a comparetively well-off family with several fancy degrees. Most of the big cities (I live in Cluj-Napoca but also spend some time in Oradea (in-laws)) are fine and relatively western looking (with the exception of the huge communist "projects" at the outskirts/buroughs), some villages are a bit like the RE4 Type sure, I've been to villages with 2-300 people where they still didn't have electricity (outside of generators) or running water, and my wife has told me stories about visiting mountain communities as a kid where the old women would simply pee standing and whipe themselves with their thick skirts as they worked the fields, no one could read or write, and everyone smelled repulsive. And then of course there are the gypsy communities who often live in what can best be described as favela style scrapyard huts or they have their "castles" (they build massive ornamental houses with the money they get from working/begging/"other sources" in the west, usually nobody lives in these). Everything's mostly come a long way though, and if anyone ever gets a chance to visit I'd higly recommend it, as someone who loves to go hiking, and comes from another naturally stunning country I can swear to one thing; Romania is absolutely beutiful and a hidden gem of a country with a lot of incredible nature, culture, and cuisine.
It was a bit of a culture shock coming from Norway to here, in Norway everything is clean, modern and relatively efficent (goverment wise). Here there's delepadated buildings everywhere, trash litters the contryside, and the goverment and social systems are infected with bloat, inefficency and corruption. There are positives and negatives to both though, there are for example virtually no "woke" people here, even among the young and university educated, people concern themselves much more with real actuall problems than pretend offense and political correctness, and people are generally warmer and more welcoming here than in Norway (where we tend to be a bit cold and standoffish by comparison, and WAY more self absorbed).
Oh but to bring it back topic at hand, just some 30 or so years ago, there was a village close to where my wife is from that legitimately believed that a hermit-type figure who lived in the hills above their village was a werewolf, it was just a strange guy who had a fucked-up upbringing, but people in this village were so scared of him that he would just walk down the street and demand they give him things (alcohol, food, blankets, ect) in a very rude and not at all "begging" sort of way, and they would do it. They made a documentary of sorts about the urban legends surrounding him;
(subtitled).
