within 15 minutes I have:

Proving my point about size being a key factor. The town I lived in also had most of that stuff in a couple blocks. It's main street, and a bit off each side. It's enough for the whole town. Only reason more than one grocery store even exists is because there's a Walmart out near the interstate.

It's not just the government that can fuck shit up, corporations are equally capable. Your friendly neighborhood wally world that is at least a half hour drive away did more than it's fair share of killing good jobs in small towns.

I was there when it came in. It really only added jobs and saved the hour drive into another city to buy shit. Casey's was the only thing that ended up closing, and nobody missed it.

But even within your own example, the government almost certainly is interfering through zoning laws or prohibitions on running a business out of your home. Half the reason why my girlfriend's neighborhood has so many shops is because so many people are running shops out of their homes.

I'm not interested in going and looking up civil code, but a lot of businesses were out of people's houses. Well, "a lot" as far as there was "a lot" of anything in that town. Which isn't all that much.

What is practical is what services the most people as comfortably as possible, which as much freedom of choice as possible, and low density car-centric planning doesn't do that.

It does when most people live further out, and there's only enough people to support an extremely limited amount of businesses. In that case, having a centralized area where most commerce goes on is the most comfortable for the most people, since the alternative is having to drive to multiple places instead of just one.