This is why we must overturn zoning - governments should not have the right to tell you how much you can build. Then we have a shot of forcing permitting to be faster. Make the delay a taking!
Strip malls exist specifically because the are the unit of commercial development that is incentivized by zoning v1.
In the 1970s-80s You People (TM) (as a group, not you personally because you're not that old, probably) decided you wanted to segregate commercial and residential and you wanted setbacks and min parking. So strip malls became because they became the minimum viable commercial development displacing the right on the street, maybe set back by ~20ft if you have parking (usually 90deg from the road) at the storefront multi tenant commercial buildings that dominated previously.
And so now you say that's ugly, that's not walkable, we want mixed use, we want parking in back, etc, etc.
The problem isn't that your rules were wrong. The problem is that anyone let you micromanage in the first place. So the solution isn't to adopt zoning v2, v3, etc. It's to stop letting you micromanage.
A business that requires a retail footprint in 2026 is going to want to do that in the cheapest, most controlled way possible.
If McDonalds could buy formerly-SFH/R lots and build stores with 2 parking spaces + street parking, that's exactly what they would do. There's too much money not to.
We can gripe about zoning's effectiveness in producing "good" cities, but I'm far less sympathetic to arguments against its existence.
Without zoning limits, you get nasty, brutish, and short city lives where sociopathic businesses are concerned.
I'm very very familiar with this topic. The other commenter nailed it - strip malls were caused by restrictive zoning. There's a reason they never happened before so-called "single family" (aka white) zoning started.