Yes, Seattle should take no lessons that have been learned from other cities who made the mistake of letting builders squeeze every penny they can from a square foot of land.
If you think that NYC could ever look like LA, you haven’t spent any time in both cities. You should look at a map and spend a moment reflecting on the geography of both cities.
It wasn’t the builders who decided that sunlight and fresh air needed to be considered/required/mandated by law, it was the people who ended living in buildings.
Seattle had spent decades in urban design for building out modern sewage/storm system, investing in light rail, and upgrading its other utilities, for what is now an environmental disaster in the making.
Seattle is taking 30% of the water from the output of our local aquifer; Seattle stop being net positive for power consumption a few years ago ( and peak power usage for Seattle is in the winter, not the summer, so Solar is not that much of an option for our area ). Instead of building a modern sewage processing system, we are building a big hole in the ground that will do nothing for us as the population grows in buildings which leave no land where ground recharge will happen ( Portland should be given some credit for actually tackling its sewage issues a decade or so ago ).