You can't appreciate beauty if your room has no sunlight, the highway noises wake you up, the trapped VOCs from cooking give you respiratory illness and the lack of insulation inflates your power bill eating into what little of your paycheck you have left for groceries.

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Beauty as an ideal should only be aspired to once the basics have been solved, which is adequate and liveable housing provision.

I view anyone who inverts this order with deep suspicion, and even cynicism. The needs they're catering to certainly aren't those of the people that have to live in these places. Especially in a modern context where an appeal to form is often weaponized by anti-housing activists, and where form is typically more than adequate but function and availability is not.

Which is, no doubt, is the reason why brutalism was invented in post-WW2 Great Britain. The Soviets kept building in "socialist classicism" style around that time; those apartment blocks from the article were Khrushev's invention, after the guy condemned the "architectural excesses" and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture.