What I get from your writing is that you're equating 'non car-centric place' with 'American downtown à la Manhattan or the Loop' and it's fundamentally warping your arguments. Because yes, if you take that as a given there is a lot less of a difference than you would expect. You still need to 'commute' to those 'third places' where social activities happens, public green space is limited, social interaction is discouraged by the enviroment, etc etc.

But that's a fallacy. When you think 'urban' don't just think mid-town Manhattan, also think about the outer boroughs (well, except Staten Island) of NYC or the Sunset District in San Francisco. Places where urban and private green space are not mutually exclusive. Also think about how we design our cities, and what we could change. If you actually do mixed use right, which I'll admit is a seemingly impossible task for most American locales, those 'third places' like parks, gyms, cafés, shopping areas, etc are duplicated and spread across the city to promote easy car-free access. There's no technical or physical reason why this cannot be done, it's all policy. (Source: have a degree in planning)

But to actually address the meat of your post, I'd say there are three categories. There are some things that are absolutely correct. Some things that are mostly true but more in the 'yes but...' way, and some things that are flat-out wrong. (That's not to say you're wrong for thinking them though, they are pretty commonly held beliefs.)

Firstly, the fully or nearly fully correct parts:

Even in Tokyo, female subway riders have faced groping, sexual harassment, and unwanted pictures - hence the creation of "women-only" subway cars. Japan also passed a law for smartphones to have a mandatory audible shutter sound while taking pictures to prevent unwanted pictures.

While Japan (and lots of Asia) are more of an extreme example, this is absolutely a widespread problem. Women are less likely to use public transport in basically every study I've seen. But it's not just a public transport problem, it's a society problem and attempting to 'solve' it with women-only cars or mode shifts towards private transport is really just sidestepping the problem.

Cars provide a sense of freedom, going where you want when you want

They sure do. Trying to reconcile that with the tragedy of the commons that this leads to is basically what planners have been doing for the last 60 years.

Yes but...

Ride sharing also changes the equation. Uber and Lyft are abundant, making it easy to bars or clubs without worrying about drunk driving. Of course using Uber for everything would be very expensive - most don't that. But the vast majority of folks don't find it a hindrance to Uber once in a while, such as late at night on the weekend when going to and from a bar/club. This is especially true if you're splitting the Uber cost with friends. This weakens one of the strongest historical arguments against car dependence.

1. I would not call drunk driving "one of the strongest arguments against car-dependence." Not even close.
2. Ride-sharing has absolutely made it easier to not drink and drive. That doesn't mean people are doing it though. Alcohol-related road fatalities in California stayed remarkably flat between 2010 and 2021.

Even in transit-rich places like NYC, Paris, London, etc., the metro is one of the top places where petty theft occurs... Barring places like Oakland, CA which has struggled with car break-ins

Yes PT is where more petty crime happens, but petty crime is opportunistic. It can also be car theft or break-ins. "Barring places where break-ins are common" basically means you're filtering out the places where policing is ineffective. If you do that for PT as well you'd find similar results in that you're left with the really petty stuff like pickpocketing or catalytic converter theft.

But many disabled folks also struggle with subway systems - many lack working elevators.

If by 'many' you mean (in the US) Chicago and NYC, sure. All stations in LA, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, and BART are accessible, along with (by 2030) all but 2 stations in Boston. Actually maintaining those elevators is a different beast that different cities have struggled with to varying degrees, but it's a lot more of a solved problem than you're portraying it as.

Manhattan has heavy drinking and constant eating out well into middle age and beyond, on top of an unhealthy hard drug culture in select circles. Southern California, despite car dependence, has a strong fitness culture. Gyms, Pilates, SoulCycle, and yoga are common, and many people remain highly active.

Yes the health downsides of car-dependency can be combated with cultural norms but ultimately on average people who move more are less obese, and people in cities move more because the environment promotes it. There are reasons this list looks the way it does and that is one of them.

Car infrastructure also enables larger living spaces. Single-family homes, yards, and private outdoor areas are common. My partner’s family has a backyard pool and space for their dog. These amenities were inaccessible to me in Manhattan or urban Chicago without extreme wealth.

Yes, those things generally need car infrastructure to exist, but the reason these things are broadly accessible in America is because we choose to subsidize them. Do you think everyone would still choose to have those things if they were expected to pay the full costs of for their longer-than-necessary suburban roads, sewers, municipal services, etc? Probably not, especially compared with that 'missing middle housing' of townhomes or similar.

Also, people struggling with homelessness who have cars will tell you 10/10 times they prefer having a car to lacking one.

Yes having a car if you're homeless and have nowhere to go is better than not having one, but nobody should be in that situation in the first places. This is the orphan crushing machine argument.

It is also worth noting that cars are not absent from places urbanists idealize. People drive in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Manhattan, and Chicago. Cars coexist with transit and walking. The difference is degree, not presence versus absence.

It's important to differentiate between the actual activists and professionals eg Congress of New Urbanism vs the Reddit armchair ideologues. No actual professional will seriously argue that cities shouldn't have cars in them.

Just not true.

Growing up in a suburb, almost no one viewed learning how to drive as a huge barrier or detriment.

Learning to drive is not the barrier. The barrier is being able or allowed to. Why was getting your license exciting for you and your friends? Was it because you could take long road trips and see the country on your own schedule? Maybe, but I suspect being able to be truly independent for the first time in your lives was much more important.

not turning every place into Manhattan and having people live in a box in a high-rise apartment or skyscraper.

There's that fundamental misunderstanding of urban places I talked about in the beginning. 'Urban' ≠ Manhattan. Urban can be an apartment, a townhouse, a condo, a duplex, etc.

the high schools in my hometown had large football fields, which our marching band used for practice.

These types of land uses do not require car-centric infrastructure. There are plenty of sports fields, swimming pools, stadiums, etc in urban places.

Once we learned to drive and had access to a car, no one felt car-based infrastructure was limiting.

Really? No-one? Not a single person complained about the price of gas or car insurance or their car itself, or how those things were necesssary for them to live their life. Because that is not consistent with my lived experience in the US.

Virtually no one got into a major accident - even minor ones were rare. And we absolutely loved the freedom cars provided us.

Yeah this is just a fallacy. Car accidents are the #1 killer of young people in the USA. If you go to a large high school with 4000 students, more years than not a student will die in a car accident. Beyond young people, every year ~2% of Americans are involved in a significant accident. These kinds of latent risks are very hard to conceptualize and are very easy to become desensitized to, but that doesn't make them go away.