This is why I actually like cubicles. you are physically close to your team, if your space is organized well you are on a common isle with people you work with, but you still have at least a little bit of isolation in your personal workspace.
Possibly because having cubicles for each employee creates the expectation that each employee will stay at their cubicle. Walking up to a colleague's cubicle to chat about a work-related project can be misconstrued by an uninformed observer as "not working". This incentivizes employees to stay in their own cubicles.
That is the simplest way I can think of by which we might come to the usual "cubicle hell" scenario where workers are stuck from 9 to 5 in their cubicles while being occasionally nagged by management (as in Office Space).
I should add that we did not have long open tables. Each person had their own mobile sit/stand desk and mobile filing cabinet for personal belongings. There was quite a few people who positioned themselves facing a corner for that reason.
I prefer cubes as long as they have 6ft walls or more. I once worked in a open plan where I had 12 sq ft of space. At least with carpet and walls you get some sound damping but can still ask hear what's going on if you need to.
Slight differences in cubes make a big difference to me. I was just moved to a cube where the only feasible setup is having my back to foot traffic and it drives me nuts.
Open office plans are soul crushing and noisy. They are not explicitly given to disorganization and distraction, but prone to it.
Cubicles are soul crushing and organized. They are not explicitly private, but prone to it.
Not all spaces are created equally. Most are bad, but some are appalling. If you find one that is "good" you probably don't work there. Give it time, and it will suck eventually. They all do. None of them are actually Home.
I find that if there are enough conversations in an open-plan office the conversations blend together and I can tune them out (similarly to a coffee shop). At the cube-farm I worked at there would often be exactly one conversation happening at a time making it difficult for me to focus on anything else.
So I find cubicles to be the worst of both worlds: not private enough to have quiet but not loud enough to tune everything out.
I DO NOT understand why cubes get so much hate.