A solution that meets the needs of multiple parties would be "better". When changing the status quo, it's "better" to find a solution that provides the intended benefit with the least negative impact on other groups.

If you actually want to provide the best benefit, we should start at the source and be looking at waste reduction. Instead of taking up 10% of the parking, it could be more feasible to take up 2.5% with smaller or less frequent dumpsters. You'd need less landfill space. You would hopefully have cheaper products through less material and less packaging. There's a lot of empty commercial real estate that could be repurposed, maybe for parking or residences with more modern waste management. There's likely other technologies that could be used for waste pickup at large buildings, like containers in the basement rolling out subsurface into the street and bottom loading into a truck via elevator. Or just more frequent pickup.

We could blame everything on cars. I feel that there are plenty of issues that are due to the old infrastructure that never envisioned all these uses or politics though. It seems other cities have figured this out just fine and kept their cars. Seems odd that NYC can't figure it out.

Seems odd though that other cities can largely figure this out. Seems like a zoning failure, but nobody is talking about that. Maybe there is bias here since the zoning threads are always about increasing density, which this problem seems to largely be based (and coupled with old infrastructure and politics/cost/union).