Personal anecdote, being a Polish-American, I've experienced the vast difference in smell landscape the article talks about. For whatever the reason, Polish culture loves flowers. You look up Polish artwork, folk dress, whatever, flowers, EVERYWHERE. Man, woman, doesn't matter. Flowers. The god damn lace curtains aren't curtains without flowers. Houses needed actual flowers too... or it's not a house. Same with Christmas. Americans are fine with fake trees. Every Pole and Polish-American I know and have known, a fake tree is a step towards Satanism. It's just... no. Christmas isn't Christmas without the smell of a tree. That and our cooking methods are vastly different from standard American foods. More earthy smells due to root veg and mushroom dishes. That gets ingrained into the walls.
I'm going to assume this was due to the prevalence of horse shit and dumping human shit outside so much back in the hay-day. Which does make sense since in the medieval era there was a large time period of thought that disease was carried by fowl smelling scents. By that logic, they would try making homes smell as nice as possible... plus horse shit stinks. That's good enough reason alone.
So all of this is so ingrained in me, American homes aren't homes without some sort of earthy smell to them. The plastic, corporate smell is your normal US home (not all, plenty do like having plants inside... just not enough people do this) with their fake candles and air fresheners. It's an "empty" smell is the best I've ever been able to describe it. While a house with actual flowers or plants gives it a "fuller" or "lived in" smell. Obviously this is all due to personal experience and how I was raised, but I can't stand buildings that don't have a few plants growing inside of it. I swear I can instantly tell, without seeing it, that there's a plant inside of a house. Even if it's not fragrant. Personally the whole "spices" thing is... eh. Nothing wrong with the smells, just they get annoying or boring after a while. Seems like that's more of a Western Europe thing.
Anyways, I learned my mood is loosely tied to the long term smells I'm around. I get a bit... agitated? More annoyed I think is the better term, when around the fake, empty smells. Outside or in a building with plants growing in it, I'm fine or just never really noticed. How much that's just me being crazy, I don't know. Like I said, anecdote.