That's the stupidest straw man I've heard in a while. The argument was not, "why should we allow it? I don't want to live in that kind of housing!" The argument is that that kind of housing affects the housing around it by increasing noise, traffic, blocking out the sky, etc., and has its own set of problems (increased likelihood of spreading disease when people live more closely together, for example). We can argue the merits of any given argument, but you've just made up an argument to argue against and it's completely false.

Read OP again: "Can't it also be about families simply not wanting to be stacked and packed into dense urban sardine can housing?"

Who is doing the "stacking and packing" in that sentence? Who is forcing anyone to live in an apartment building? OP seems to believe that anyone living in an apartment was taken and put there.

Does OP find it so literally impossible to imagine that anyone might not share his over-the-top, grandiose disgust for apartments?

Nope, but if enough people do share it, they should be able to elect a local government that will help to keep them out.

Just like if the people in a neighborhood find pig farms to be stinky, they should be allowed to, through zoning, keep a property owner from building a pig farm next door.

It is not that simple. When a city builds offices without providing housing they are effectively forcing housing as well as infrastructure onto neighboring cities, while keeping the revenue from the office buildings. In my opinion this demonstrates that cities are too fine grained of a decision level for all regulation of housing supply.

Again, substitute gay marriage in here.

It's like being against gay marriage because you'll be forced to see gay people happy.