I'm more concerned about noise isolation

Concrete buildings seem to isolate my neighbors' noise far better than wooden structures

When you say "wooden structures", you're referring to typical stick framed construction with likely no sound dampening or insulation. This post is about mass timber construction[1], where the (manufactured) timbers function more like a concrete or steel columns/girders/shear walls.

Many modern concrete buildings use steel stud framed walls, which are actually worse than stick framing for noise isolation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_wood

Noise isolation is much more a function of how the actual insulation being put in. If houses are build to the lowest standard than yes they will be incredibly noisy. I mean cheap concrete apartment buildings are essentially made with large concrete frame and thin plaster interior walls.

Mass, decoupling, and air tightness are all required to isolate sound effectively. All three are expensive to implement, and spec homes (houses built to immediately sell, as opposed to live in) are all about saving money to make more profit.

Yeah, I lived in a wood frame building. The first week we were there, we heard some young kids right outside our door making noise. I opened the door to ask them to quiet down and there was nobody there. But I can still hear them. So I go up one floor. No kids, but they’re still just as audible as before. I go up one more floor to the top floor. Sure enough that’s where they were, 2 floors above us. It sounded like they were at our doorstep. Needless to say we moved out after just under a year because of the noise problems.

Note that this isn't a problem in wood frame buildings built with proper sound insulation, so it's more that regulations in many municipalities allow weak sound insulation, and developers build to the cheapest spec possible if there's no compelling reason not to.

Except when someone wants to drill a hole to hang a painting. You can hear that multiple floors up or down. I live in a 30 story building and the drilling noise in a real nuisance.

noise transmission (and the reduction thereof) is affected by all aspects of building design. A wood building will not always be noisy. More expensive buildings tend to have multiple mitigations in place for sound transmission. These can be multiple special purpose layers in floors and walls, from elastic layers that are only a few mm thick, to inches of poured concrete present only for the sound response. A technique in very nice stick-built (the 5-over-1s mentioned) buildings is to have walls built with different structural systems for either side of the wall. Two layers of drywall on a single structural wall acts like a membrane, transmitting sound to the other side. Attaching drywall to disconnected structures greatly inhibits that vibration, at the cost of a thicker wall (lost rentable sqft) and ~2x spent on structure.

Engineered wood is really impressive and I can’t wait for it to be more common.

Is CLT/NLT/glulam less weather resistant (eg. against excessive humidity/moisture) than traditional buildings though?

All modern homes require active humidity management as they're sheathed with plywood externally and drywall[1] inside. Even if you use concrete or brick you still need active humidity management if you don't want mold growing on all your furniture, etc.

There's no more old growth timber to build (and furnish) homes the way they were built 100+ years ago. All the alternatives require active systems to prevent rapid degradation.

This is even true of modern towers--the types of steel, the techniques, the tolerances, the use of reinforced concrete, etc, require active systems. Towers built 100+ years ago were in some ways more resilient than today, having used materials and techniques--knowingly and unknowingly--that could hold up to the elements better with active management.

[1] Even in high-end builds, nobody except perhaps a die-hard DIY'er with money to burn uses more moisture resistant drywall variants or alternatives throughout an entire home. I once toured a 100+ year old house supposedly renovated and lived-in by an architect. They basically rebuilt the entire structure, including replacing much of the timber with steel. Everything _looked_ high-end, except the walls if you paid attention. They just used regular drywall--not the cheapest, but definitely not the nice stuff (e.g. what you might find in a class A commercial office). IIRC, the internal doors were solid core, but that hardly mattered given you could hear everything through the cheap walls.

To add, humans emit a lot of moisture just by breathing. Also, modern code limits how much air can leak out of a house. It’s those leaks in old homes that let them survive without moisture control, because that leaked air would carry the moisture away.

Would one be able to achieve a similar effect by simply opening the windows on a regular basis? (Assuming all the other principles around good air-flow and ventilation were following in the building layout.)

Yes, but modern humidity controls are able to regulate moisture levels while also reclaiming heat. That is, if you open all the windows your warm/cool air will flow out while fresh air flows in; an energy recovery ventilator will partially precondition the fresh air as it flows into the house, using the outgoing air as the source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation

That fire resistance video is impressive.