My friends are no different. I pay most garages by direct debit for servicing. Cheques are on the way out. More and more places have notices saying that they no longer accept cheques.
I think we’ve mostly discovered on the forum that there is often no “one answer fits all”.
France is a big country… in my neck of the woods the Cheque Book is alive and well used. 
cheques in last couple of weeks for osteopath, singing teacher, club canin, cesu, and sewing class. Alive and well here. Small auto-entrepreneurs can prefer as don’t have smile or any other machine for cards which cost them.
I wish they would ban cheques in supermarkets what a bygone era palava they are🤣
Wouldn’t mind betting that approaching the end of the calendar=tax year taking a cheque may offer the option of flexibity to some tradere as to in which year they bank it?
Absolutely right, Karen - in fact, it’s even one month/quarter, depending on their accounting period. I remember an English couple with a holiday home here who got badly caught out. They had a local plumber in to re-fit the whole kitchen, and paid by cheque (as requested) from their French bank account. They assumed that he had banked it, but actually he held onto it for 4 months (cheques are valid for 12 months in France) . . . . . then, when he presented it, it overdrew their account by about €1,000. In consequence, the bank had to lock the account, and refer it to the Banque de France - and they had to pay cash for everything until they recovered their credit-worthiness.**
The carpenter who did a lot of work in my house used to send me the final bill in the period that he wanted to receive the money. It took a bit of getting used to as I always tried to pay as soon as the work was completed.