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A mate of mine was a private buyer on a housing association built new estate, end of Phase 1 out of 3 (terrible, never do it as you just don't know how long your gonna be living in a building site).
For them, unusually, it worked out. Phase 3 backed onto them (all in green field) and were supposed to get a garden around 5m deep and length of property line (biggest on street already as backed into a corner), maybe 20 or 25m long? New phase 3 lines were drawn up and moved the whole lot further up the hill. Their garden is now 20 or 25m and instead of 5m deep away from house, they've got more like 30m. Developer/builder redrew all the site lines/property boundary as basially some bad ground underneath where Phase 3 was supposed to go, so easier to strip half a street off and moved the boundaries up the hill a bit.4 years on and its still a huge clay pit though. My man probably in around 100-120 tonnes of top soil and material now to get away from the clay pit aesthetic, french drains, pumped sump the lot. Looks amazing though. So you can luck out on these things, it does happen! The snag list inside the house took over 2 years (before C19 too!) to complete, and a bunch of finishing details/bad plaster/bad woodwork, they are now just living with as can't be done with the hassle any longer*
*This is what many larger organisations literally rely on, the sappy UK public just living with it, as the hassle > the end goal. Le sigh.
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BrickMan
Our experience in Wiltshire was to buy a 4 bedroom new build off plan in 2014 - which initally was great and reasonably quiet but then more people moved in, it got progressively noiser, more overlooked and although the house was very spacious and comfortable the surroundings started to feel oppressive.
we sold in 2019 and stayed at a friends for around 4 months whilst we waited for eveything to go through on the purchase of a late 60s 2 bedroom knackered bungalow with a fab garden and loads of potential in a great location, location, location.
Moral of the story is - it worked for us and we made a bit of £ over those 5 years but there is no way i'd want to live in a generic newbuild / estate again.
I prefer a bit of character although be prepared for all sorts of things going wrong in an older house. (including rats...)