> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default

I feel like the absurdity is the other way.

Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.

With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.

They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.