There's a point in the biopic Crumb where they point out how, in R. Crumb's time, all comic book artists had uniformly been ignoring the "urban clutter" of power lines and utility poles and that kind of stuff in the skyline, but Crumb would consciously put them in, and fill up the page with those details, and that sort of unapologetic realism was one of the compelling things about his art.

Nice read but hard to resist the "X but in Japan!" jokes.

It's funny when an article takes a stand against an unsourced group of random anonymous people on social media.

Anyway, (not just) Japan has a long history of art with a juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern. The prints are talked about in the article. This might be what a lot of subsequent anime's aesthetic is based on, as we also see stuff like Goemon Ishikawa XIII (a throw back to 16th century) in the Lupin III anime (which is set in contemporary times). It's a trope all its own.

Even in modern art, we see power lines as a focal point of art, as in Arthur Dove's work: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488540

The Barenaked Ladies have a song that mentions power lines in a somewhat romantic way: https://genius.com/6365258

In the neighborhood where I grew up, there were transmission towers that went through about 200 meters away from my house. During the winter when we got freezing rain I could hear them crackle slightly. All the other infrastructure was buried, the transmission towers were the only overhead lines.