This argument doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, IMO.

Say you have a section of urban highway that is severely congested. If roads are a profit-center, congestion is a strong market signal--demand outstrips supply! More people want to use your product, but your supply is insufficient. The obvious solution is to build more supply. Until you do, you're leaving money on the table! Quick, expand the road! Build a tunnel! Do something!

The exact opposite logic applies when roads are a public good. They become a cost-center, and any concern about meeting demand becomes subordinate to a thousand other concerns. The costs of building and maintaining roads remain real and immediate (They cost money! NIMBYs hate construction!), but the benefits of building and maintaining roads become abstract and distant (the benefits are: fewer complaints? More economic activity in the long run?) The laws of supply and demand no longer apply, and you find people saying insane things like "Why should we expand that congested highway? Expanding it will only draw more cars, and then it will still be congested!". In a free market, such nonsense is unthinkable. No business would ever say "Demand is so far in excess of supply that increasing supply is pointless!" Yet as soon as market incentives are removed, this nonsense becomes the default.

Every day on my commute, I spend ~30 minutes driving 80 MPH on private highway, and the instant I hit the public highway I am in bumper-to-bumper traffic, as one of the most congested stretches of 4-lane highway in one of the largest cities in the country is reduced to two lanes as it passes under another highway. It costs me 30 minutes of my life every day, and there are no current plans to resolve this bottleneck. The notion that public roads are saving me from evil rent-seeking capitalists is just silly. I prefer self-interested capitalists to incompetent public administrators.

This isn't to say that roads should be totally deregulated--incentives matter, and the state has a legitimate role to play in ensuring that consumers are protected from malicious actors. But the incentives associated with public ownership are so perverse that it's hard to imagine a private option resulting in worse outcomes.

> at worst they strip the infrastructure of all value without any maintenance, getting taxpayers to build it again.

The worst-case scenario for privatization is the default scenario with public ownership!