The sole purpose of those boards existing is to inflict those very wounds, which are not "self-inflicted" because the people who compose those boards are homeowners and the people hurt by the wounds tend not to be.

Homeowners benefit from the ability to obstruct/delay/deny others from building more housing, because it makes them a frighteningly huge amount of money by making their property worth more.

Morally yes, these people ought to be told to go pound sand; the very fact that there's legal authority to prevent dense/tall housing from being built is abhorrent, but it's the function of those boards (and everything else is secondary) -- to "increase property value" by artificially restricting what other people can do with their own property.