Our legal standards for what constitutes minimum acceptable housing actively fosters homelessness and any discussion of how those standards are excessive -- even in comparison to other developed countries with high quality of life -- gets ridiculous replies completely shooting down the idea that if civilized, well heeled people in other developed countries can feed a large family with a smaller kitchen, then maybe we have room to design smaller kitchens in some of our housing units.
IMO these standards just make no sense at all, scrap them. The market is literally designed to sort this sort of issue out - if you want a bigger kitchen pay for it, someone will provide.
Artificially restricting the minimum size of dwellings is just forcing people to either overpay for housing or be homeless.
Seems to be “a feature not a bug” because as you suggest, this is actually problematic for people trying to live a simple dignified life.
Like, there's NYC and SF and then there's rural Kansas. There's people earning $10k a year and people earning $10M.
In the UK we don't have any sort of national expectation from what I can tell. I have friends living in house shares, in apartments, in houses, and in really big houses, they all have different kitchens, obviously they do. You get what you can afford, having an expectation is meaningless.
If there's some sort of building code that says fridges have to be massive, then yeah, that's bloody stupid, but that's not specifically a kitchen issue, that's just anti-poor law.
There's a mildly amusing joke I don't quite recall right now about how everything in America is big. Serving sizes, houses, cars, political parties, theme parks, the people...