Are you implying everyone should live in big cities and not own a house? Yeah no thanks. You could not pay me enough for that. I will take the small trade off of needing to drive to get to most places while living in a small city and actually owning a house and land.
Plenty of rural towns had small downtown areas for commercial properties and offered a mix of housing in and nearby - from apartments, to towhouses, and even detached housing. Nothing stopping people from living in the woods though. It's certainly not for everyone, but the current paradigm is largely driving
everyone towards detached single family homes, sprawl, and car dependence in an ever growing expanse of suburbs.
If you like rural living, good for you. However, most people live in urban and suburban environments, so we probably shouldn't make large planning decisions around the relatively small group of people that want to live in rural areas.
The solution to car related pollution is EVs, but they do need to bring the costs down so they can be accessible to average people. Big rigs, airplanes, ships etc contribute a lot more pollution than passenger cars as well so solutions need to be figured out for those too. A lot can be done to help all of that, but shoving people in cities is not the answer. We should not be compromising quality of life.
The solution to car-related pollution is not only EVs - the bigger thing is to just get people out of their cars altogether. The damage from personal automobiles is not just about air quality and fossil fuels: it's also about the waste created by paving tons land for parking, the ever growing expansion of freeways and other supporting infrastructure, and also just the economic cost of supporting sprawling personal auto infrastructure and the impacts on people's household budgets to maintain 1+ vehicle per adult. We need to think more holistically: building smarter communities where people can get by with 1 car
per family or less, because there are alternative and safe ways for them to get where they want to go on a regular basis (ie, frequent mass transit, complete streets for walking/cycling/whatever). This reality isn't some ridiculous idea either: we had done this in the past, and there are many places in Western Europe where this is a reality.