I missed the part where they said they wanted to live in "a dense metropolis filled to the brim with high rises where I cannot barely see the sky, and people are jammed into streets like cattle and no one has yards". Did you respond to the wrong comment, or did you just invent a strawman to argue against?
Not strawman, but this guy just has Burgerbrain: the only choices he can conceive of are those in the US. Anyone who has been to any suburb in Europe or Japan knows that you can easily build housing that is well between "high rise hellscape" and the extremely large parcels in most US suburbs. It's mostly about allowing those options to be built, which most zoning currently precludes. Any non-SFH-only residential area is so expensive and rare in North America that only high-rises make sense to justify the land cost. Meanwhile, everyone in the burbs will fight tooth and nail against allowing multiplex construction because they think it will lower land value somehow (and is often code for "we don't want the poors moving in here").
Burgerbrain indeed. I wish I could take everyone here strawmanning my comment and thinking I want us all to live in Takyo for a trip to Houten, NL - a not very exciting suburb of Utrecht (though some there would take issue with calling it a suburb instead of a town in its own right!) where you can do everything by bike and public transit.