Zoning is an important and foundational aspect of civil governance, and works well for the most part.
If SF residents in any clear majority wanted to have zoning laws changed, they probably could, there's a fair component of democratic impetus here.
Most importantly - it's essential to recognize that points of property are not fundamentally discrete from one another.
The value of one piece of property depends a lot on what's around it. Large buildings vs small ones, noise vs quiet, density vs. green, sun vs shade, - there are major externalizations to every property, and zoning helps establish parameters for those things.
Go ahead and put a 50 ft flag pole on our front lawn with a flag on it and see how your neighbours react.
There are innumerable situations wherein tall towers would go up beside homes - they exist in droves in literally every city. Go to any North American city, go to where there are tall buildings - and find homes nearby. Those homes are likely there due to zoning.
There are even more instances wherein homes would be knocked down to put up all sorts of other things - office buildings, industrial facilities, retail outlets, clinics - whatever.
There is in general, no interest in that. Not even the folks wanting to build 80-story towers want it really, lets the autoplant be built across the street and destroy their own property value.
Where we disagree is whether it is an abuse, not the mechanism by which it is justified by the State.
We don’t disagree that what is around is a factor in our purchase and selling decisions, but to be frank, when the developer of your hypothetical skyscraper bought the land to build the skyscraper, he didn’t buy the lot across the street with it that would one day become this hypothetical autoplant, nor the use rights for the lot across the street. In fact, the developer probably didn’t buy across an empty lot because someone that is building an 80 story apartment building wants to attract tenants, and tenants want neighborhood amenities if they’re living in an apartment building.
You could still build across from an empty lot that might be an auto plant in the future, but you don’t build that big without a business case. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we’re agreed on that, and I’m not even 100% against zoning, just maybe 99% of how it is used.
When you buy property, you buy property, not the rights to limit the development and use of all the other properties around you. That “right” comes from a simple tyranny of the majority using the State as their vehicle of power.
But there are good reasons we ought to have governments, and fewer reasons we ought to have a State. I would sum those up as keeping the four horsemen at bay, adjudicating disputes and delivering justice. A few decent reasons too, such as accelerating R&D with their justifiable actions, but pretty much everything else is an abuse of power and tax authority.
Also your examples are ridiculous. There are few places in the world where you can just throw up an 80 story apartment building, and even fewer people who can afford to to spite their neighbors. A world where police powers are not abused to the extreme that they are is also not one without a quiet place to retire without an organometallic peroxide plant nearby, nor one without remedies if a neighbor chooses to break ground on such a project.