Lets call the adaptive people "Alice", like in cryptography, and use one of your examples at random: Air conditioning.
A hundred years ago, if it was too hot Alice just shrugged and didn't do anything about it. She just accepted that "It Is What It Is." Around the turn of the century, one guy, named Willis H. Carrier, decided "enough is enough, I'm going to fix this" and invented modern electric air conditioning machines. These days Alice accepts the new state of things: you can buy air conditioners, and once purchased, you can turn them on.
But lets be honest: If Alice had to use a building without air conditioning, or broken air conditioning, there's a snowball's chance in hell that she'll actually do anything about it, despite the ready availability of such devices and specialised tradespeople to fix them.
I've regularly visit a government office where 200 people have sat sweating for three years because nobody lifted a finger to I dunno... maybe see what's wrong with the aircon.
This observation exactly matches my experience of the world.
I'd love to live in your world where most people go out of their way to improve the status quo in novel ways. It would be... magical.
Incidentally, you cannot have it all: this architecture is not cheap, not fast, and isn't designed to withstand earthquakes or floods. But you'll never need air conditionning.
A few years ago I've been in an old monastery, almost daily, in both summer and winter. The summer was good, albeit with a window open. Not as good as airco, but good.
However the gas costs in winter were insane, from what I heard it was in the hundreds of thousands of EUR.
The fact that it emitted cool air was a side bonus in summer.
There are other issues with the quote. Look at where and when George Bernard Shaw lived (1856 - 1950) in the United Kingdom. The elan of the era that Shaw grew up in Britain was all about "taming" nature and "civilizing" the benighted brown people. This was the era where people went to areas that had previously been jungles and tried to have manicured British lawns. This was also the era where Great Britain tried to impose the British way of life over civilizations that were thousands of years older than it. In many ways, our world is still recovering from the effects of the "unreasonable men" that George Bernard Shaw talks about.