In Britain, there is no such thing as rotation at the PhD level. You apply to work in a lab and then you work there for 3 years (or 4 years, increasingly nowadays).

Like you, I lucked out and picked a great lab for my PhD but I know other people who, although they had no way of knowing in advance, ended up in horrible situations and either hated their PhD years or only survived by switching labs. So I’ve always seen the American system as a better one.

One thing that is happening in the UK is that you get Masters courses, which include rotations, and then automatic progression to a PhD, generally in the lab you liked best out of your rotations. this seems a good system but it’s only happening on a small scale.