The alternate take on "the US is ahead by enabling car ownership by a huge chunk of the population earlier" is that the US tried it and is a cautionary tale for how it breaks down once the population gets large enough. It's still "good enough" for now that it would be extremely hard to justify the cost of undoing it - though Lagos would be the even more extreme version of that tale, if US cities ever want to get significantly denser. I'd say no other country would want to follow it, but it's not like it's purely a planned thing there either (see Lagos again). But the more developed places that already/still have the trains are unlikely to decide Atlanta or Los Angeles traffic is what they're missing.