They're fine if you're going to use them, like play around on them. Otherwise you're only doing it because the HOA wants high property values (because everything must be ready for liquidation at all times in America). I live in the Midwest, the alternate solution here is prairie grass. It grows well without any help because it's native, it's better for the environment, and looks great, especially in the spring. Add a cute white girl in a flower-patterned sundress for maximum effect.
The ultimate sin of the lawn, really, is that lawns are propped up all over the country (and all over the world) without any respect to whether the environment is conducive to them. You'll see yards in fucking deserts because everything must be ready for liquidation, therefore everything must be broadly appealing, therefore everything must be the same. Yards are based on the English-style garden that the nobility used to have in the later stages of the medieval world, which were opposed to the French style. They're well suited to England but not necessarily anywhere else: so why are they used everywhere? Lack of imagination, lack of respect for local beauty, lack of community, lack of humanity, a lack of anything solid or committed, in favor of the eternally liquid and alien. Being beige isn't good but it isn't bad either.
Places should have their own preferred style of gardening, something idiosyncratic and of specific value to that area, rather than these alien landscapes shoved onto the world with brute force. A desert home should be built for the desert and be surrounded by desert landscaping. A home among the redwoods should be built for the rain and be surrounded by forest landscaping. It shouldn't be a house LARPing as an English cottage, with landscaping LARPing as an English garden. They should quit trying to look the same as everything else. They should be themselves.
