Yeah, I immediately skimmed the article to see if there were any pictures of what the author considers ugly so I could get a sense for what their tastes are and

Yeah, I immediately skimmed the article to see if there were any pictures of what the author considers ugly so I could get a sense for what their tastes are and adjust for that accordingly, or even conclude that their opinions weren't relevant to me, and the one single picture of an example ugly thing that I was able to find looked absolutely perfectly fine to me, in fact I liked it. I think a lot of the complaints around ugly architecture are just matters of difference of aesthetics: I'm autistic and a have certain amount of brain damage to my vision centers and so I deal with sensory overload a lot, and so I tend to prefer interfaces and environments that are clean and simple, made of just enough shapes and colors to communicate the structure of things and that's it, with no extraneous ornamentation or gradients or whatever, so a lot of modern architecture looks fine or even nice and refreshing to me, like a glass of cool water. Meanwhile, most of the people I find complaining about this sort of thing are the typical hipsters and grouchy conservatives — both of the "I was born too late" variety and the "I was literally born a long time ago" variety — that are looking fondly on a past age just out of their own personal preferences and predilections, and probably without any real understanding of what it was like to live surrounded by overly ornate architecture all the time, which is perfectly fine for them, but then they make these Grand think pieces and statements about how things should be, which is frustrating since I would rather gouge my own eyes out then live in the world they would prefer oftentimes.