Though, it makes me wonder how much better cities fair, as I’m not so sure they’re doing much better being able to afford covering the costs of all their crumbling infrastructure.

That’s going to depend on density. Higher densities means more people paying for the same amount of infrastructure, leading to better affordability.

It’s also going to depend on the type of infrastructure - car infrastructure scales hilariously poorly, while transit generally becomes better when you add more riders.

It’s actually the opposite - suburbs and car centric design are strangling cities. If you look at history before car centric design and suburbs, the best quality of life was generally found in cities.

But, the way we build cities has changed since the 50s, and they don’t get the density that they used to. It used to be the case that a city generally grew by increasing the density of older parts of the city. Single family homes would become multifamily townhouses, which would give way to multi-storey apartment buildings. As the density increased, so would the tax revenue per square foot, allowing a city to invest more on improvements like infrastructure. But since the 50s, cities generally don’t increase density like that. Instead, they build more suburbs filled with single family homes that are a net drain on city revenue. And then you add in the infrastructure needed for cars commuting into the city every day, and that revenue per square foot gets even worse. The suburbs are basically subsidized by the densest (and often poorest) sections of a city.

The example I always think of is the old main street style businesses vs. the modern convenience store. On the same piece of land that today houses a convenience store in the middle of a parking lot, you used to be able to fit 3 or 4 businesses and possibly apartments above them.

The taxes from dense cities cover maintenance for suburbs. They are subsidizing them. There are neat 3D tax maps that demonstrate this (that I can’t seem to find).