It’s a sign you have a lot of money slushing about the local economy... which I suppose is what people would call a maturing city.
There’s a pretty tight correlation between population, total wealth in a city and architectural quality. It’s no coincidence that the cities regarded as great modern architectural cities are virtually all expensive cities with relatively high populations (north of 4 Million). More money sloshing about = more money to be ostentatious and showy.
A Toronto of 2.5 Million was simply never going to compete with genuinely large, modern cities in architectural output. The buildings look cheap, because they are cheap. Nobody was gonna pay NYC or London rates for Toronto office building, so there’s not the same money to put into architecture.
It’ll be interesting to revisit this conversation when Toronto reaches a population of 4 Million, likely in a decade or two. It’ll be emerging as a genuinely large and wealthy city, with a population about half of NYC’s, roughly the same as Sydney and about the same as Chicago’s during its architectural peak. If Toronto is still building shit like CityPlace at that point, then I’ll conclude that Toronto is just a fundamentally broken city. But until then I’ll just chock it up to size and economics