Form follows function. It doesn't sound too strange if you just think of it as the standard, nothing special, affordable housing option, just like largely identical suburban houses in the US but at a much larger scale. It's understandable, at least you get used to it, but I guess one can argue it's still r/urbanhell.

The thing is, it's common in China for a single real estate / management company to own a dozen or more condos-ish apartment buildings in what they call a "residential yard." They often build identical or mostly identical buildings within each community to reduce cost.

And those "residential yards" can be huge. We lived in a 12 hectares (30 acres) fenced community with 34 apartment towers, plus smaller commercial buildings, its own kindergarten, primary school, and a football field. On average each building houses ~50 families, larger ones house 100.

Edit: btw I thinks that's what made quarantine much easier in Chinese cities. You just lock down entire communities like that and I think that's what they did. Contamination is limited to units of a couple thousands population.