This isn't really a good way to judge things. In the future, the fondest memories someone else has about technology will be about the present. The past is not better, you're just nostalgic for it.
And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.
> that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required
What are you talking about? We should absolutely do this. We should extend this to as many domains of human achievement as possible. By this logic, computers shouldn't have existed because it devalued the skill that scribes and accountants developed before word processors and spreadsheets. Blender itself is a tool that made 3D accessible to thousands of people who previously had to pay for expensive licenses, training, and SGI workstations. Literally the whole point of technology is to make more things possible for people unable to do it naturally or without great effort.
I do nearly this exact thing with these shoeboxes, so you can pull them out from the front and have enough collapsed in storage to always have more on hand: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW
This can also be fixed by increasing supply. People buy housing as an investment because they expect it to increase in value. The best way to counteract that is to build and continue building so that doesn't happen.
An enormous bummer of a fact is that Majel Barrett, who was the voice of the computer on Star Trek (along with a number of other roles), did phonetic voice recordings specifically to reproduce her voice, yet nobody has used those recordings to do so. I'd love to see her on this list.