I feel like that's more true of ex-urbs. I lived in sububia and there were creeks, schools, pools, malls, a graveyard, train tracks, sport courts and churches, all within a 15-20min bike ride. Half of that was within a 15-20min walk, including the houses of half of my friends. "Downtown" was most of a mile walk and a 30-40min bus ride. Granted, it was old suburbia from the 50s-60s rather than new 90s builds, but there wasn't more than a 2 story building within a mile in any direction.

It's still that way, only with more bike lanes and fewer kids outside.

So usually people who talk about suburbs refer more to the sprawling burbs of like late 60s+. What you’re referring to sounds like a “streetcar suburb”, which urbanists usually like

I follow this debate often on HN and I've learned that those who say you can't walk or bike anywhere in a suburb are talking about areas I consider rural.

Or different suburbs than you’re used to. The ones nearest to where I live in DC are more urban than the California suburbs I grew up in (which were by no means rural) but they were designed without sidewalks or direct routes so kids need to be comfortable biking in the street with huge SUVs and pickups passing a foot away at 40mph – unsurprisingly they don’t and that’s probably the right call because multiple times a year someone in those safe suburbs is killed at a place where their city felt street parking was more important than sidewalks.

You can still walk and bike in the suburbs I’m thinking of- it’s just dangerous and/or extremely inefficient a lot of the time. And getting worse because of larger cars and road design prioritizing vehicle speed over everything.