I say this as someone who bought a house because of most of the reasons mentioned here. That being said, buying property does not somehow imbue you with the right to keep things exactly as they are for three decades while you pay it off.
Cities expand, people move in, population increases. If your quiet, picturesque residential street turns into a rush hour parking lot six years later, that's nobody's fault but it doesn't mean the right thing to do is put up speed humps (the oversized, usually movable plastic speed bumps) or whatever other nonsense you can think of to stick it to people because you were unlucky in your choice of property.
If it's not obvious I am using the royal you, not you specifically mikeash :)
Then one day they build more subdivisions around your subdivision and suddenly your street becomes a convenient way to get to this newer subdivision just as you were driving down roads that were quiet before until your subdivision got built.
Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up. Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems as with increased density comes other transit options, especially public transit, as well as the reduced need to travel so far since everything's packed into a smaller area.
Instead of grocery stores being a mile apart, you might have two or three within a single square mile because of demand.
Its also a fact of life if we insist on building up. I've never seen a suburb that could compete with NYC on traffic snarls.
> Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems
Yes, it does, though it tends to be limited (at about the level where traffic is frequently slower than walking) by lack of parking spaces limiting the number of cars.
> as with increased density comes other transit options
Other transit options are necessary to allow densifying existing areas, because of the point above; you rapidly hit the point where you can't get more people in and out with existing infrastructure. That doesn't mean you don't cause the same traffic problems with density as with sprawl -- you do, and in fact you maximize them that way.
I also completely disagree with your evaluation of pointlessly twisty roads. I dislike them too, but they work really well at keeping through traffic out of the neighborhoods. Many of those pointlessly twisty roads are useless for going anywhere besides the houses they serve, and even when they are useful, they're usually less useful than the main roads. Cut-through traffic is usually a problem in areas with grid layouts, because that makes the side streets nearly as good at getting places as the main road, which can easily transform into "better than" if the main road is congested. For example, the first story in the article is about Takoma Park, which is pretty griddy.