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."