Do you mean in the context of Toponymic surnames? Where you might have a locational name with a preposition attached like “de la place” or “de place” or “di place” or “la place” in most Romance languages, or “von/van place” in Dutch/Deutsch or “place+ski” in Polish?
I’m not an expert in this but I have read about it a bit over the years as I also wondered why English seemed to drop the prepositions more than other European languages. The basic answer is that there was a lot of reasons.
For one thing, some English surnames just gradually absorbed the preposition over time. Atte- surnames like Attenborough are an example of that.
For a second thing the English in general started to adopt inherently family names among lower nobility and commoners earlier than most of the rest of Europe. Let’s say a guy named Robert moved to London from the town of Buxton and was known in London as Robert of Buxton, where he rose to enough prominence and had such a relatively unique toponymic surname for the area, that his London-born son James gets the “of Buxton” surname too. That way it’s easier to identify James as that Buxton guy’s son, instead of calling him James Robertson or James of London, which is much less identifiable. Fast forward and now James of Buxton is also prominent in London and now he has a son, so at this point you’re 2 generations removed from being “of Buxton,” and the name has stopped being a way to identify where you individually are from and is instead a way to identify who you are from. Now it’s just a family name and the “of” eventually gets dropped off.
Now the preposition drop-off/merger is actually happening in every other language too. For instance there are many people with the name “Garza,” “de la Garza,” and even “DeLaGarza.” And this process has then been sped up with globalization and immigration to places with different languages and everything else where people may simplify or anglicize their name to fit in.
The main difference in perception is that in English they started dropping the preposition in prominent names as far back as 1066 in some cases. While the rest of Europe stuck with locational naming traditions for a lot longer. I’m not sure if the link I just posted is the correct source I read a few months ago, but it’s generally believed that the “mixing pot” nature of the British isles starting with the Anglo-Saxons bringing in their Germanic languages to mix with the Latin and Celtic et al languages that were there, and then all that mixing with the similar-but-different cousin languages from the Danish/Norse invaders and settlers and then Norman conquerers in 1066... it basically created a situation where there were a lot of people speaking a lot of different bastardized Frankenstein languages and trying to understand each other. Dropping the various prepositions in locational surnames like of, in, de, di, von, van, etc just made it easier for everyone in the isles to communicate.
Plus the Scandinavian and Celtic influence. Almost forgot about that. Scandinavian cultures pretty heavily only used patronymic surnames where your last name is your dad’s name + son/sen until very recently. Not much of a coincidence that by 1066 at the end of the era of Vikings and Anglo-Saxon dominance of most of England that they had started dropping all the extra prepositions in Toponymic Surnames.
And I’m not 100% positive but most of the celtic languages are also very patronymic and maybe never used prepositions with Toponymic names. Had the Romans never spread all the Latin influence to Britain I’m not sure if there would have ever been “of the place” names there in the first place.