I agree with all of what you say, particularly with the last paragraph (I strongly believe that road/parking subsidies/legality has stopped a lot of good development and encouraged bad development to the great detriment of cities).

Dense single family housing is great too - I wish it was more common. Apartment living can be great for families too, where there is good public space around it - there are many people with a mental block against it though.

One of the great difficulties is that people can usually either easily afford a house or will struggle to afford one. The former live in grand houses. The latter in whatever is cheapest. Whilst terrace houses may have good amenity and also be space efficient, they are the choice of neither the rich nor the poor for this reason.

The thresholds thing is more difficult. Transit depends on type but more often fails for lack of pre-planning ("oh wait. we have to build a tunnel now. If only we'd reserved some land for this earlier"). Restaurants/corner-stores are great but whats shown in the linked examples is proper centres which terrace houses won't generally support (within 5 mins walk). Its worth also noting that some existing centres can support a store (where the shop owner owns it already and it just ticks over) where it wouldn't be something you'd build commercially nowadays (where developers would want a modern commercial rent, rather than just ticking over, for better or worse).