It works well many places. Maybe not quite 20-story appartment blocks, but Norway has plenty of examples of mid-density 5-6 story apartment complexes in groups pretty much in the middle of nowhere that are popular and function well.
I think a key distinction is that to work well these developments needs to be demand driven, and social housing needs to be integrated without being allowed to dominate.
Norway has its share of bigger apartment blocks built rapidly right after the war to cover a lot of social housing too, and they tend to have been a bigger problem. But most of the house building in Norway after the war was part funded by government through cheap loans etc., but were managed by private house-building associations that built based on which locations and types of housing was attractive to people. And that's what has driven a lot of the building of areas like the ones mentioned above.
So there were fewer large scale attempts at building these huge social housing estates that have served to basically concentrate social problems in some countries.
E.g. near where I live now in London we have a couple of major council estates that used to be big problems because they were basically a way of building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no services, and dumping thousands of underprivileged people together there. It was thought of as massively progressive at the time - you built pretty much villages (these estates have their own shopping parades) out in the middle of nowhere. But while many of the people given flats there were regular families, many were also people with additional problems ranging from mental problems through drug/alcohol problems and other issues that contributed to making the estates themselves hotspots of social problems that affected everyone. One of these estates had a life expectancy five years below the UK average for a long time, and it took decades to normalise things there.
Currently, partly as a result of financial constraints, partly as a result of harsh lessons like that, most new social housing in London at least comes in form of concessions by developers as part of the planning process that involves much lower concentration of subsidised or council run properties in any development, rather than building these large estates.
So I don't think the problem with the more suburban apartment complexes had much to do with the concept, and much more to do with an execution where it was often driven by ideology and totally unproved theories about city planning that were allowed to run amok in the post war period in an urgent need for volume that favoured large projects even when how they affected the integrity of the cities was unproven.