I live in the UK where they are common, they're a nightmare to live in, you can hear people arguing or babies screaming 4 houses down.
A lot of houses are detached but very close to each other or semi-detached (linked to one other house). Both are far more pleasant to live in than row houses or sky scrapers.
Is all that normal for the big cities with dense, multi-story housing?
In your opinion.
Some people think driving cars are bad. Some people think eating meat is bad. Some people think space heating is a waste of electricity.
Everybody seems to think their particular way of living is perfect and everybody else is either too wasteful or doesn't know how to live.
Your argument really is just "this is my subjective opinion of how to live and people who disagree are wrong".
Where you see charm some of us see waste. Grass is ugly and so are single detached family homes. Row houses look nice, so do skyscrapers. Inventing a simulacrum for the country estate and calling it a "dream" is a bad joke I'd like everyone to start laughing at.
This is it. This is the mother of all bad policies in the USA! From keeping African Americans out of our neighborhoods via red lining, to increased police presence, to one generation's artificial chokehold on the housing stock. Americans should feel nothing but disgust for most of our housing policy, and single family homes should be derided as one of single worst allocation of resources the American public makes. People defend these things as lifestyle choices, and almost never live into the carrying capacity of the asset they buy. It is one lifestyle choice I feel comfortable judging.
Just so no one thinks I don't have any skin in the game I do have a child.