One aspect that is often overlooked is a room acoustics - especially reverb time. Have you ever felt cosy in a large church?
Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally.
The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot.
Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.
The most important aspect of a room's acoustic performance are its dimensions. Rectangular rooms have 3 axial modes that dominate. These modes are easily excited and store energy which you perceive as rumbling, booming, droning, etc. A very small input can get a large room going like crazy if it is mechanically coupled to the room in any way. Even decoupled sources (your neighbor's home theater system) can easily excite the axial modes.
Any dimension longer than 28' is going to pass the infrasonic threshold (20hz). This tends to be OK as you go further into it. Humans are sensitive to infrasound, but often not at this level of intensity. However, designing rooms with all dimensions larger than this exceeds the limits of most practical residential real estate.
An 8' dimension would give you a 70hz fundamental. This is quite audible, but also in a range of frequencies where treatments like bass traps are very effective.
The room dimension range between 10' and 28' is where the dragons live. These frequencies are audible and significantly more difficult to treat. They will cut right through treatments like rockwool and mass loaded vinyl as if they didn't exist.
One of the best mitigations is to simply not have rectangular rooms. The second best is to have really small ones. Older homes tend to feel cozier because the room fundamentals are not in that weird range.
When testing speakers, I discovered my room (or house) is resonant around 40Hz. On most other frequencies the speaker was quiet, at 40Hz it felt like the room was shaking. I wonder if the effect of vehicle noise (I'm between a large road and train tracks, and near an airport) is amplified by this, though I've not noticed any impact - then again, it's not as though the vehicles are generating constant sine waves, and I don't have a quieter baseline to compare to.
Given coffee shops etc hire psychologists to select annoying music to optimise revenue, I wouldn't rule out bad acoustics as a choice (particularly larger chains)
Though with bars and restaurants being brutally hard to survive and turn a decent profit, I would mostly attribute it to just cutting costs
I spent most of my adult life in Berlin and most places here it’s due to 100% ignorance. Tearing out everything and putting in euro pallets as furniture + packing the place w drunk ppl was the general modus operandi. Acoustic treatment doesn’t have to be expensive.
We had this when we moved from an old brick office to a new bigger one full of glass panels. We had to fill the new office with random planters and other stuff or it was uncomfortably echoey
You don't need to live a consumerist lifestyle to have a home that's properly outfitted (curtains), comfy (rugs, chairs), and quiet (walls/divisions).
Also for a fun large-scale argument: we're relatively sheltered from global depressions. All we really have to do is convince Americans to keep spending money and it kinda works out, because the whole economy is structured around that anyways.
That's also why the economy is in the dumper right now (not counting tech companies), and why the consumer confidence index is so important to our various economists.
Or, if you have ever been to a wedding and wondered why everybody started talking louder and louder and it's hard to understand, a room with too large reverb time is a very probable causes. This is very draining mentally.
The same goes for living spaces, especially since newer homes tend to use lots of smooth surfaces like glass, tiles and concrete, which increase reverb time a lot.
Book shelves, curtains and furniture will increase a room's diffusiveness and reduce reverb time, making rooms feel so much better.