The article is complaining about the monotonous copy-paste style, and I agree it is bad in some places, and we should have a high standard, but it isn't that bad most cities in the US and usually the urban areas where those styles are built are the more interesting looking parts of town.
We are a far cry from anything close to the miserable monotonous replication of massive apartments that goes on around the world:
Hong Kong
or Russia
,
or Iran
or UAE
or Eastern Europe
or Seol
or Russia
(again)
Overall America enjoys pretty nice urban apartments. It's good to make instructive criticism, but is not as bad as the article makes it out to be. The world has a tremendous number of people and they need housing. There's only so many nice old buildings to rehab. Building new is incredibly expensive and there's a finite number of resources. People need affordable places to live. As long as they're at least as nice as those listed in the article, I'd be happy with that over the atrocious looking ones all around 169 and I44. Not every place has to be a gem. That takes hundreds of years to develop city mostly full of gorgeous buildings like in parts Europe or parts of NYC and is extremely costly (and even those places are a hit or miss hodge podge of styles and nice/ugly buildings).