Yes, every time people get grumpy about modern architecture and look over to see if I agree I tell the story about how I used to work at a company in Boston which moved from a beautiful 19th century building to a soulless Modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper. And thank fucking god: the old building was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, had too little natural light, and was too cramped. The Modernist building was better to actually be in in every way. Buildings are there to be used, not just looked at in pictures.
I'm pretty sure that some kind of hybrid can be found where the exterior could look nice and the interior would be very nice as well.
Now, not every modern building has to look like a glass and steel colorless brick.
For example, I really like the look of Oodi [0], Helsinki's new library: it reminds me of wood covered with snow, and the interior is exactly what you would expect from a modern building (built in 2018).
It's not hard to make an old style building with modern amenities. I have a 1920s home and with like a few days of work it lives like a modern place. This is not some dichotomy.
Ultramodernist glass-skinned skyscrapers have to cover their glass walls with mirror-reflective film to keep out the majority of the natural light. Otherwise, they are solar ovens. A 2.6 m × 3 m office outside wall facing east or west becomes √2 × 2.6 × 3 ≈ 11 square meters of sunlight when the sun is 45° away from its normal, and sunlight is 1000W/m², so it's like an 11000-watt space heater. Without aggressive air conditioning, the temperature in that office rises even faster than the temperature in a parked car with the windows rolled up. You could be dead in minutes if the air conditioning failed.
The ultramodernist alternative is to build the entire wall out of windows coated to reflect 80% of the light, a "g-value" of 0.2, or a little bit more light if the windows open onto a larger interior space. You can let in slightly more visible light than the traditional approach by using coatings that have even higher reflectance in the infrared, but the vast majority of solar radiation is visible light, so the improvement is small.
Those walls of glass do give you a wider view, which can be nice, but in order to keep from killing you, they don't give you more natural light, except marginally.
