Bricks have very low r-value meaning that you pay a lot of money to heat/cool them. Bricks is a bad choice for construction anywhere where indoor climate control is an issue.
American construction is strong enough to last for a few hundred years if you maintain it. While it isn't passive house efficient it is efficient (and it isn't clear that a passive house is even possible in our climate - many of them make other compromises which means they rot out in a few years).
How can you know about r-values but not that every modern house built has cavity walls that can be/are insulated?[1]
Even hundred-year old houses can be insulated by DIY drylining. You'll lose about 10cm of floor space though. Sometimes there's even some government grants available for this[2]
I'm biased to US construction methods of course. Note that while bricks are themselves of a worse r-value than wood, but wood isn't actually a great r-value either.
Note that bricks are not a strong as wood under tension. They do well under compression, but that is not all the loads to account for. Bricks are used in cities and commercial construction primarily because they do not burn and so you can use them as a safety barrier.
