From my experiences, twice monthly payments are nearly universal. From what I gathered, the reason is that for a lot of employees, some states require payments to happen twice a month. For example, this is the respective CA state law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Now, this CA law actually does not apply to most tech-employees (which will be consider "exempt employees" - which also means that they do not have to be paid overtime). But in my experiences, employers don't want to run separate payment processes for exempt/non-exempt employees - so everyone gets paid twice a month.
I don't know that I've ever had monthly. Most of the time my pay has been twice a month or every two weeks (the latter ends up with some weird scenarios at some companies where there's no benefits deduction in a 3-paycheck month). I've had a handful of jobs that paid weekly. The worst was contracting somewhere where I did weekly timesheets but was paid bimonthly. It was just after another contract agency had shortchanged me on my pay so I had to keep a manual log to make sure that all the hours I worked were paid.
Because other payments are monthly (rent, ISP, mobile phone contract, subscriptions - at least in Europe), so having a constant money in <-> money out equilibrium makes sense. Unless these things are also charged every 2 weeks in the US.
I think the idea in the US is that if you're having to wait an extra two weeks to get paid, you're essentially having to "float" half your monthly income all the time. This impacts people who are on the poorer end of the scale, and there's a very high percentage of Americans that don't have more than a few hundred dollars to their name.
I think it's more of a psychological thing for me.
If I were to get my income every day, that would be very boring. On the other hand if I were to get my income once in 6 months, that would be horrifying.
But 1 month seems to be a sweet spot. Double the amount half as often.
Other utility bills come in monthly in my country (which is in Asia by the way), so that's a factor as well.
But yeah, I can now kind of see the appeal of getting paid every 2 weeks.
I dug into this and was surprised to learn that salaries are paid every fortnight in USA.
I wonder why. Does anybody know if this is the case even in FAANG companies?
Where I'm from it's paid monthly. I think I prefer that.