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Passports to Spain/Portugal/Malta/Greece/Cyprus are buyable but incredibly expensive, you basically have to make a few hundred thousand to a million or so Euros in property investments in the country.
Italy is just a popular second passport destinstion because it's one of the most likely for Americans to qualify for and it's relatively easy compared to the rest of Europe, since anyone descended from an Italian citizen (i.e. anyone anyone who resided in Italy in the 1860s or was a citizen afterwords) is also a citizen, with no generational limit. The chain is technically broken by mothers, but you can sue for discrimination and win to get it anyways (this is pretty common).
Something similar also applies for Hungary, except past your grandparents or so you have to actually at least be conversational in Hungarian. But the thing with Hungary is that a Hungarian citizen counts as anyone who has ever been a citizen of a Hungarian state or lived in Hungarian-controlled territory throughout the entire country's history, even if it was 1000 years ago. So if you can reasonably establish that you're descended from anyone who has ever been "Hungarian" (which is most European-descendant people BTW, and is generally actually decently accessible for genealogical records even for people without recent European ancestors since there were many prominent Hungarians in the Habsburg family line) and you can speak Hungarian reasonably well, you can get a passport.
I think Lithuania also has similar rules to Hungary but I'm not sure.
Poland is any Polish citizen born since 1920.
Germany is extremely finnicky and can even vary by region, but in general any German citizen before 1914 lost their citizenship after 10 years out of the country so for the most part descendants of Germans born 1904 onwards have a decent case for citizenship by descent. But I've seen people successfully gain citizenship from ancestors born in the 1890s. It all really depends on the luck of the draw for your embassy agents and the amount of good documents you can muster up. The good thing about Germany is their bureaucracy is extremely quick and I've gotten responses in less than a day of sending questions and requests. Technically they don't allow dual citizenship, but the law is changing soon and they have been making exceptions (something not very common in immigration, mind you) for that for a while now, for US citizens at least.
Slovakia is generally pretty lenient, if you have a grandfather or great-grandfather from the Slovak portion of Czechoslovak territory since like 1900 (maybe even before) then you might qualify for citizenship by descent. This is actually what I'm going through right now (since my non-biological great grandparent came here from Slovakia), and while it's very time consuming and relatively expensive (I'll probably end up spending more than a few hundred dollars, probably a few thousand, over the next year or two before it's over) it is possible to do without hiring an immigration lawyer (which cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars). Be warned that Slovak bureaucracy is well-known for... not being so quick.
There's also the "Slovak Living Abroad" certificate to which you can get residence without actually having Slovak citizenship by descent, it's provided if you can prove considerable cultural ties to Slovakia and that you've helped contribute to Slovak culture abroad (you have to have Slovaks and others holding the SLA vouch for you too).
Czechia is less forgiving than Slovakia in this regard but it's still likely you qualify if you're a Czech citizen.
For Ireland and UK, it's if you have grandparents from Ireland/UK or parents who are Irish/British citizens.
For Switzerland I think only Switzerland-born citizens pass it down.
For the Netherlands, grandparents born in the country pass it down.
Nordic countries are very strict on citizenship by descent and only allow you to claim citizenship before your 21st birthday if you have a citizen parent from the country.
Dual citizenship is completely illegal under any and all circumstances in Austria, but those with Austrian parents qualify for citizenship (you must renounce all other citizenships).
Spain and Portugal allow those with grandparents who are citizens to pass down citizenship. They used to accept anyone descended from Sephardic Jews who left the country in the 1500s, but I think they met a quota or something and then stopped accepting those applications recently.
You can technically gain French citizenship if you're recommended by a higher-up after serving a few years in the French Foreign Legion, but you don't want to do this. I highly advise staying as far away as possible from the FFL, and on the off-chance that you even get past training, the odds aren't in your favor for applying to citizenship even after years of service.
And this is most of the knowledge I've gathered about the subject while trying to get a way out of the country for the past year or two.
Other than buying citizenship or going through the process of citizenship by descent, the only realistic way to get permanent residence in a European country is by having years of experience in a highly valued field and getting a work visa / blue card (or in Germany's case, just find an employer willing to hire you and the government will allow you to stay) and work in the country continuously for a few years (usually 5 years). You may have to contact an embassy or look up the jobs the government of the particular country values, but in general they want: engineers, software developers, other STEM, medical professionals, tradesmen. And you'll probably only have a chance of being considered if you have at least around 3 years of experience working in the field.
Another option if you're young and have the proper credits is college, although this is usually pretty expensive – but it can be very cheap in most of Germany, Finland, even LatAm countries like Panama, since they have free tuition for foreigners and very low-cost housing for students. Norway/Denmark used to have free tuition for foreigners, but last year they stopped doing that and now only allow EU citizens to go to have no tuition costs. This is an option for people who did very well in high school or who have already completed a Bachelors (sometimes even an Associate's is enough), but if you didn't then you're out of luck and only qualify after you get a degree.
Adding onto the statement about working in a foreign country for citizenship, you can actually gain a self-employment visa to many countries on the condition that you have enough money to sustain yourself without government assistance, or make enough money to do so from your own business. It's not allowed to work for someone else under this type of visa, and you can't change it into a normal work visa, so you have to make all the money by yourself or already have it saved up. Plus you generally have to have like €10K-15K deposited in a government bank account that you're not allowed to withdraw from, as a guarantee that you won't be a liability to the government in case you can no longer sustain yourself – in that case your visa won't get renewed. After a few years of this you can apply for permanent residence. But realistically you could just apply for DAFT in the Netherlands, a self-employment visa in Portugal or Germany, etc. and as long as you have like 5 years of living costs saved up, on top of the required deposit, you might be able to just live your life until you eventually qualify for permanent residence. But that's only really an option if you have a ton of money, most people need to actually be able to sustain their own business.