There are two kinds of cities.

One of these cities is ideal for the automobile. It is spread out, to avoid creating traffic bottlenecks. This sprawl is further exaggerated to make room for parking. Unfortunately, personal cars are exclusionary because of cost and necessary license restrictions.

What's worse, sprawled, car-friendly cities are unfriendly to pedestrians and public transit. You get bus stops that are simultaneously too few and too many (a bunch of stops with only one passenger). A city full of skyscrapers is terrible for cars, because your roads clog up whenever the drivers try to enter or leave (welcome to LA!) but it's great to pedestrians, because you get so much available in a short walking distance.

The point about spreading out horizontally is factually incorrect. Much like the natural limit to building height is floor plate dedicated to elevator shafts, the natural limit to sprawl is roads and traffic. In general we have a lot of unused vertical space, but not a whole lot of spare roadway.

The word “only”. The article argues well that efficiency should not be absolutely important - but the remark about Freud missteps by treating efficiency (in this instance, of vertical building) as absolutely unimportant, as opposed to merely unabsolutely important - a factor to be balanced against others.

A particularly egregious example of overhorizontalization would be Robert Moses’ drive to have people commute into NYC by car from Long Island. While, yes, there tends to be more greenery out there, I would contend this clashes with the author’s “harmony with nature” principle by driving an extreme increase in the reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the “make people happy” principle by lengthening commutes as compared to the higher population density permitted with vertical building.

Spreading horizontally doesn't scale. What our society needs is more density, not less.