I noticed the author is a civil engineer. Asking a civil engineer if you need more infrastructure spending is a lot like asking a barber if you need a haircut or asking an orthodontist if your kid needs braces.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/18/what-happens-w...
Perhaps surprisingly, I'd consider Charles Marohn to be less focused on denser urban planning than one would expect. His message is more that whatever we do, we should ensure that the tax base is enough to support the infrastructure we do build. It's fine to have people on farms in rural areas, but we shouldn't be running miles of paved road out to their houses.
And I think he's made a really good point before, which is that sparse, auto-oriented development, and development that depends fundamentally on endless growth for funding is actually a radical departure from how people have built villages, towns, and cities for pretty much all of human history. It's not something that was really intentional, people just copied what they thought seemed to work in Detroit and didn't think too hard about it. The cost-effectiveness of dense development, whether urban or rural, is pretty well proven at this point.