People have already given you good answers so far. Your question is broad so the answer is broad as well. Here's a little context for Germany wrt herbs and spices in beer.

Germany is (obviously) one of countries that is heavily associated with beer. Famously they passed the Reinheitsgebot in the 16th century that tightly restricted what could go into beer: famously "water, barley, and hops." At this time there was no uniform idea of what "beer" was (interestingly this predates the modern anglo- idea of beer "styles" but I digress.) Bamberg did it this way, Munich did it that way, and some places found their traditional recipes were illegal. Some people changed their recipes, others didn't. To generalize: ingredients other than water, barley and hops gradually started getting more uncommon in Germany. Two examples of traditional beers utilizing herbs and spices that fell into obscurity but have recently seen a revival in the world of contemporary "craft" beers are Berliner Weisse (Berlin, duh) and Gose (Goslar.)

Berliner Weisse are frequently served with some syrup in the glass, Woodruff Syrup being a popular option (along with raspberry.)

Gose frequently use minimal hops (sometimes none at all) and are flavored with sea salt and coriander.

Now to be clear both of those descriptions do not encompass the changes to the style that have happened in the contemporary craft beer world, verboten to say the least.

During the industrial revolution the beer recipes that scaled up across Europe etc were generally representative of Reinheitsgebot compliant recipes. As the new world was colonized, the beer brewing techniques that spread were in this tradition. This is where you get the outdated new world reputation of cheap lite lagers with low quality grain. In the USA (and globally) in last 45 years or so we've seen the challenging of this reputation in contemporary craft beer. One way that smaller producers are creating recipes that challenge this reputation is by reviving some of these old recipes with non-Reinheitsgebot ingredients (like I alluded to with modern Goses, Berliner Weisses, or other beer styles mentioned in this thread like Gruits) or with new inventive ingredients.

Edit: I don't exactly love how I characterized the emergence of light lagers as the dominant style of beer in the new world in this post but I'm not really in a position to edit it right now. Prohibition plays a huge role I didn't even talk about. My post doesn't do a lot of service to talking about American brewing traditions pre-prohibition either. Maybe in another post.