The photo on the right is downtown San Francisco. On the left side of the photo is a cluster of dozens of tall buildings. On the right are two buildings that stand alone. Why?
The two buildings on the right are entirely residential. All the buildings on the left are commercial.
Commercial buildings need to be close to each other, or were in the past, because business requires a significant amount of face-to-face time. You actually need to talk to your lawyer some of the time, to your designers some of the time to your accountants and to your bankers. This was much truer in the past than it is today but it is still reflected in the density of commercial buildings.
Residential buildings need to be in lively retail areas but they do not need to be close to each other.
What is it about tall buildings? Why do I see them in Third World countries that lack the skills to even create a modest sewer system or build a bicycle?
The answer is that tall buildings, with steel structures and elevators have significant economies of scale and consequently can return healthy profits to the builders. As the floors go up, the cost per square foot goes down dramatically. The only incremental costs are the materials. Elevators are quite efficient and only water needs to be pumped to higher floors. Water can be pumped to the roof and gravity does the rest.
How high the building goes depends on the point at which economies of scale disappear. But even at that point the building can go up a few more floors because the total cost per square foot remains lower at the eighth floor than the costs at the second floor.
Limits on building height generally are related to the geology at the base and the technical skills that can be effectively imported to do the construction.
If you can get into the construction business for tall buildings it is a desirable field to be in, worldwide.