Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter the type of atmosphere and lifestyle in the towns the writer talks about. In the UK where small houses and towns are abundant, the quaint shops go where the money is and the rest of sit in traffic to drive in and out of town to go to school and work.
In most of the US, you can’t build like this, because of zoning & planning restrictions, so regardless of whether the “middle and working classes” want them, they can’t. The fact that the neighbourhoods that do offer these features have incredibly expensive housing is evidence that people do want to live in these kinds of places.
The UK, like a lot of Europe is a mix - in general new development is very car centric, but still much higher density than in the US.
I live in a much denser town and I couldn’t walk to the GP, school or train station. They’re all 30-40 minutes walk in different directions. And we don’t tend to just choose the closest services to where we live.