I've always hated lawns too - house after house with the same kind of pointless, perfectly manicured square of green. The waste of all the water and energy, all the chemicals used to keep out anything but grass. I mean, it may as well be astroturf given it's always kept looking like it!

I fully agree that some vegetation looks nice, and is good for insects and birds. But I'd much prefer some variety at least - different grasses, wildflowers, moss, clover, local plants, and not kept permanently trimmed 3mm off the earth. I mentioned this to my wife a few years back, and she looked at me like I'd gone crazy, and I've had the same aghast looks from others too.

Actually, I'd like to see some proposals for regulation around this. Homogeneous lawns are just such a colossal waste.

Unless you've got an HOA or a city or county law that requires you to water your lawn, or are in a place with very low rainfall, it should be safe to skip watering the lawn most of the time.

A lawn should be able to go 4 weeks with no water in the summer and not die. It will go dormant, and once the water starts again it will green up quickly. A dormant lawn will be brown and you shouldn't walk on it much, but if you don't need to do things on it and aren't bothered aesthetically by it, it's fine.

Once it goes brown, water it maybe every 3 weeks just to make sure it doesn't go from dormant to dead if you don't get enough rain.

Like a lot of things in life, it does serve a purpose, but only a social one (the social pressure of having a well manicured lawn), whether it's because of a HOA or a need to suck up to neighbors. Which makes it even more obnoxious than serving no purpose at all to me! Just another chore.

It does serve a purpose, though, it's parkland ultimately. People use their lawns to host events that might be larger than what their home could host, they are a safe area for children to play unsupervised, it's an area where you can produce food for yourself without having to spend earned income to feed yourself, livestock and pets can roam it, etc. Plus, many cities in the U.S. are park poor and the only greenspace really is what is available privately.

Those points are mainly true of back yards, not really front yards though.

It depends on the local regulatory environment. You can do these things in your front yard where I live (based on what I've seen among my neighbors at least).

Plants, grass, and trees are pretty. People tend to feel good looking at them rather than just concrete, asphalt, and plastic. Lawns attract birds and bees and butterflies and bugs. I don't think there's any real mystery about why people like lawns.

Well, small proviso: yards with (flowering) plants attract birds, bugs, etc. Wide expanses of constantly-mowed grass lawn do not so much.

The grass part of my yard feeds many rabbits and birds (grass and worms, respectively). Other than when covered with snowpack, it’s rare to go two days without seeing a rabbit and birds are feeding every morning, especially after rains (that bring the worms higher). This is in a small city yard that’s mostly grass.

Sure, rabbits are happy enough with mowed grass, but if you asked them, they'd probably rather you didn't cut the tender tips off all the time. :) And the species of birds that hunt worms in the ground are a very small subset of what you could find in a city. (I would venture you're mostly seeing robins.)

that's an argument for a nice garden you find in the British countryside, but the manicured American suburban lawn looks like something ordered out of an ecommerce store, factory produced. Actually urban concrete jungle is more interesting.

That's only what happens in the bougie suburbs. Literal teams of professional staff making putting greens in front of stately homes, because keeping grass that thick and low takes a lot of regular work. Most places that aren't a desert or Mediterranean climate in the US don't need their lawns watered, rain is frequent enough, and grass might only need to be cut 1-2 times a week if that, depending on the rains. Overall, even in places that need sprinklers like CA, sprinkler systems don't use much water relative to other strains on the water system such as industry. It might be foolhardy to grow a lawn where the heat is regularly exceeding 100*, however, because you will practically have to water multiple times a day to keep up with the hot ground baking out the water.