Building luxury apartments is a good thing. This is well-studied. Where luxe apartments are sited, cost of surrounding housing drops. It shouldn't need a study to confirm, since it's simply the law of supply and demand, but: yes, when you give wealthy people who want to live in apartments new construction, they buy it in preference to gut rehabbing existing apartments.
"These are just for-profit developers building luxury apartments" is the single most common objection to new multifamily housing where I live. The irony of it is that it's always coming from single-family homeowners, all of whom practically by definition live in spaces more luxurious than any of the proposed apartments.
You experience seems to be in a broken housing market which the article is trying to fix.
All new apartments are described as luxury. It's makes them easier to sell.
If land prices are high and it takes years to get approval to build then only expensive apartments will be built because cheap apartments won't make a profit.
If only expensive housing is allowed to be built then most people will only be able to afford to rent.
In which case another developer will build them. Assuming the numbers make sense.
Either way refusing to allow apartments to be built because you fear they will be "luxury" is dumb. It just means that the only people who get to live there are the really rich who can afford a full-sized house.
When developers are allowed to build apartments, they build luxury apartments.
As long as profit is the motive, the affordability half is likely to be neglected.
I also feel like building more rental properties serves the property owners more than it does the "dweller".