I've never been to Vienna so I can't speak to it but my experience in traveling around the world is that many cities have incredible central cities but also have sprawling medium to high density suburbs that everyone turns a blind eye to. The low density automobile focused suburbs of North America might not exist around those cities but the denser suburbs still have poor livability, especially compared to the central cities they surround.
Yeah, Vienna is very nice! It doesn't feel like a "Big City" at all. I'm partial to the Montreal example in the article - it feels the most 'human scale' to me - but everyone has different tastes.
I feel like the US would be better off looking at cities around the world that are pleasent, and pattern-matching off of that.
Vienna is beautiful. We should do more of what Vienna does.
Clearly tweaking the US's "process" is just moving deck chairs on the titanic.