It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa.
It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc.
The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.
What's your educational background? I have been following the field closely for the past five years, and I am starting to feel like staying in application development is a dead end unless I start learning AI and Machine Learning concepts at a deeper level.
There is no a priori reason that society feels comfortable acknowledging, but for anybody without those hangups, the reasons are actually quite obvious.