If you're not paying neighbors to keep their land the way you like, why should you have any say in that?

Note that they have a say in what you do with your land, too.

Is it OK for someone to buy the house next door, and build a cafe? What about a night club, which has loud music and closes at 4am?

How about a rendering plant? Or installing a large propane storage facility?

Is there nothing you'd consider unsafe, unwanted, beside the house you just paid $500k for? Which is now worth $200k, and makes it horrid to live there?

These laws, like all laws, are necessary.

Where the problem sits, is when they go too far, or not far enough. There is a sweet spot for everything!

That is a pathological way of thinking about it. You could also think of it as a collective pact.

Poking into peoples' property for minutiae is also pathological, and plenty of Americans have horror stories about HOAs fining them for silly things like the height of the lawn not meeting regulations.

It's one thing if you can opt out of a collective pact by picking another jurisdiction, but local busybodies are so widely spread that land legally allowed to be developed even in a short but dense, traditional American style, is so scarce that it fetches a premium, so now there is nothing between the extremes of "quiet cookie cutter suburb far from everything" and "busy noisy neighborhood of tower blocks."

If I moved into a neighborhood that had rules that I liked, and now you want to replace it with a free-for-all, should you have to pay me?