That last sentence is worryingly close to conspiracy theory territory. There is no unified ‘They’ controlling what gets built in your town. Different places have different reasons for different things to be built. If you are seeing gas stations, it’s because someone with access to money, or pseudo-money in the form of debt, thinks they can make more money by building a gas station.
Chain A coming up directly across from Chain B might be one company trying to take over the area from the other. It could be Chain A management stupidly thinking 'we made $1,000,000 from our station at 5th and B, so if we open another at 6th and C it will also make $1,000,000. It could be upper management telling them to spin up more locations so they can go into next quarters investor meetings and say ‘Pay no attention to the debt on our balance sheet. Pay attention to the fact we just built 1000 new locations! We’re expanding! Please value our stock higher!’ It could even just be money laundering, criminals paying themselves $2 for every $1 of construction they do and then running the business pretending to sell gas for $8/gal. The one thing you can be assured of is, absolutely no one is sincerely saying ‘People need more banks and gas stations.’ The kind of person/organisation that spins up a dozen gas stations does not care what people/society need(s), only what they can do to convince people to give them more money.

Apartment complexes. Lots of apartment complexes

No, banks are closing braches in Australia all over the plave and moving online and digital. In the nearet big town to me, 2 gas stations have closed but a thrid one was refurbished. Australia is rolling out elecrric cars slowly and they don’t have partisan political support.

Where I live most of the “banks” are just kiosks located inside of grocery stores.

I’m not really seeing a lot of new buildings at all. So many places have gone out of business that they just keep re-using the old ones.

Yes. Banks and gas stations.

Also, self-storage facilities and car washes. And churches.

You know what they’re not building? Mixed use, walkable anything.

Market demand. They get built because the capitalists think that people want them to be built. If people don’t want them to be built, they would go out of business and shut down.

But to answer your question, my city is sprawling and growing vertically at the same time. For the new neighborhoods, yeah, gas stations, bank branches and other such businesses do get constructed in the central commercially zoned part.

In my town, the only new businesses are car washes, vape shops, and drive thru coffee franchises.

We had plenty of all three to begin with, but now there’s far more than anyone could ever need.

Where I live there’s this crazy new obsession with car washes. Like, 3 brand new ones being built on the same street. I get that they became way more profitable when they figured out the subscription model thing, but I feel like so many is unsustainable.

No new banks or gas stations in the last 5 years here.

Around me, it’s car washes and storage units. Literally half of all the new commercial construction around me.

My city is building anything but what humans want. Benches, parks, trees are not built

No. Most banks barely have physical locations anywhere and every single gas station I can think of has been there for as long as I can remember pretty much.

The only fuel station built near me is a huge electric charging one with a few fuel pumps as an after thought and every bank branch has closed except one

For a while it was Chase banks specifically. Looks like they maxed out on those. What I see now are car washes, self storage facilities (a seemingly disproportionate number of), and car parts stores.

My village has a moratorium on new banks and is actually using eminent domain to take over a building from one. I have not seen any new gas stations going up. If you think it’s excessive it’s time to get involved in your municipal government, there are no doubt public hearings on zoning approvals where enough loud voices can stop or slow down overbuilding. That’s what happened here with banks. We have limited real estate and people got fed up.