Pretty sure France and Singapore both have quite successful and high quality public housing projects.
France has similar issues as the US housing projects from the 70s (creating ghettos), these are not places that people choose to live. And yes, all governments put up halo projects that you see in the press that do not represent the average, please link me to them claiming I'm wrong, and I will say yes, this halo project designed by a famous architecture firm does look nice! Now show me the median late-1970s constructed French public apartment.
Singapore is different because they eliminated the "cheap" part. Singaporean HDB flats are expensive, have extremely long wait times (you're stuck for life when one comes up), while still being super tiny. Fertility rates are 0.87 there (replacement rate is 2.1). The domestic population is literally disappearing itself. I'm sure highly regulated tiny housing stock and development policy has no influence on family size though...
The floor space and the proximity to neighbors are perfectly valid reasons to not prefer apartments. Calling them a "blight" is bs, unless you had in mind as your ideal something like historic parts of London because rows of identical mansions in a suburb looks to me no different than rows of vertically stacked apartment blocks. They are both clean, geometric and "industrial" looks.