Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.
Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.
Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe.
There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.
Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre.
Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x.
I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.
2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago.
Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.
