Car dependent design is the problem that prevents children from being able to play with friends, because they are dependent on an adult to bring them somewhere.
Car dependent design also has negative feedback loops for community in other ways. Local shops can't compete with big box chains in the suburbs due to economies of scale and are forced to close, further increasing the need to drive further for basic necessities. Cars are dangerous, further decreasing our base level of trust for interaction with our local community.
These are just the surface of the iceberg though - take an open minded approach to reading up on the second and third order effects of car dependent community development before being so quick to dismiss the topic.
These statements as facts aren't helpful because it implies car dependence is the only thing. There is so much history and nuance here. OP is right, making every discussion essentially '/r/fuckcars' doesn't get us anywhere.
Anecdote: I grew up in a small suburb, 100% car dependence. However I still walked to grade school and rode my bike on roads/sidewalks where cars are the same now as they were in the 90s.
I think back to my childhood and roaming the streets. There wasn't any formal community venue or organisation. No one then or now was going to church. No one was going to a community centre or youth drop-in facility. I don't remember parents coordinating much. We rode bikes on the street, kicked a football and walked to the school basketball court or ovals. Parents generally felt safer about their kids doing that, so it was trivial to walk out front and find another kid to socialise with.
Because it distracts from the parts that many people don't like to talk about because it goes against their personal beliefs (such as religious conservatives being more connected with their communities and overall happier than everyone else)
In more religious countries, are the religious conservatives the ones that are freely roaming streets and socialising more than their peers in a "play-based childhood"?
The obvious changes to me, as a parent now, and someone who still visits the street they grew up on in the 80s, relate to cars.
HN is heavily biased towards tech centers (SF, NYC, Seattle, etc...). These places skew liberal, agnostic, pro-public transport, pro-dense housing.
Conversations will always shift towards these talking points, the few of us that don't fit into one or more of these boxes get drowned out as out-of-touch.
Just as a hint, Europeans love their cars as well. They drive them a lot and outside of large cities public infrastructure is sparse at best and almost never an actually viable alternative.
If they post pictures it is almost always of the few square kilometers of the city where millionaires and shops for millionaires are located. The rest of the city is full of streets and cars are everywhere. The one difference is that there are trains, which usually are awful places but get you from A to B.
In a huuuuge share of the US, this is not the case. There are no sidewalks, you have to travel extremely far to get to anything, and cross highways or even freeways doing it. There's no transit. There's no village center or train station around a natural focal point, just giant strip malls that are few and far between. So EVERYONE. MUST. DRIVE. It is the ONLY option for every trip and errand, there is no alternative. This is insane.
I've lived in Jacksonville, Nashville, Atlanta, and Phoenix, none of which are known for having the greatest walkable urban infrastructure but none of what you've said here is true (other than lack of a train station) of any of them. Where did you live in the US where there are no sidewalks and you had to cross freeways to get to anything? And no transit? Not even a city bus? Or does that not count.