It's actually so ideologically important to me that solarpunk aesthetics don't fall into the trap of just being "cottagecore with a bit of technology"
that's true, but we also can't forget that traditional methods of building homes/planning towns do a lot of the right things, even if our ancestors didn't care about solarpunk principles. They use local materials and built houses with the local climate and longevity/ease of maintenance in mind, rather than just caring about how much profit building the house will make them.
I cant help but think of that one video where an African woman (I'm so sorry I don't remember which country she was from, I want to say ghana?) said she was tired of getting online discrimination for living in a "mud hut". She explained that her home was actually very well suited for the local climate and far more comfortable than a "modern" house, and when it needed repairs she didn't have to buy expensive foreign materials to fix it. To me, that's as solarpunk as anything I've seen.
I think where people get confused is that for most of the english speaking internet, the only traditional methods of homebuilding they've ever been exposed to are Northern European stone cottages. It's the usual problem of the modern US/English perspective being incredibly overrepresented in conjunction with the compound effects of hundreds of years of biases around what it means to be 'advanced'.
Modern north american houses suck and people living in them know this deep down, they've just been starved of alternatives in multiple senses -- economically, logistically, culturally, and educationally.
