Perhaps, but the tone underlying the article, as with most art and style critiques, is if you don't care about the considerations they are critiquing, or if you

Perhaps, but the tone underlying the article, as with most art and style critiques, is if you don't care about the considerations they are critiquing, or if you even prioritize them lower than affordability, ease of construction, and low barriers to development, then you are a philistine — you have bad taste. But it’s downright shameful that we deprive ourselves of living in interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places, given the thousands of precedents for inspiration worldwide, and many hundreds within our borders. Instead, we’ve copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh. We’ve all seen them. Covered with fiber cement, stucco, and bricks or brick-like material. They’ve shown up all over the country, indifferent to their surroundings. Spreading like a non-native species. So it's not really the sameness, per se, but the that these buildings all have, in the opinion of these pundits, the same bad taste. Stucco is okay on thousands and thousands of five-hundred-year-old homes all around the Mediterranean, brick is okay on 19th and 20th century buildings throughout America, but these same claddings are somehow anathema on five-over-ones? One paragraph before the above quote they lay out four economic reasons why the same styles are proliferating, so it's reasonable to infer that diverging from the sameness would make properties more expensive to build, and thus to buy. I think that making city living accessible to the non-wealthy has a greater chance of making cities "interesting, meaningful, and wonderful places" than trying to create expensive architectural diversity.