A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours?
If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.
Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.
There's beauty in chaos.
Arguably there could be even more beauty in not even raking them! That doesn't mean leaf blowers and rakes are comparably cost effective, though (as implied by the claim I replied to).
In fact most of the times the city will provide a truck a few times a month that will vacuum the leaves from the road, provided you push them all to the curb.
Not every suburb is this desolate, cookie-cutter hellscape like you see in places like Texas. Many of the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, have real reasons to manage foliage.
And if you think leaf blowers are bad, just remember, people just used to collect them into huge piles and just burn them (still do in very rural areas), or worse yet, just toss their bags of leaves into the trash can. Leaves and landfills are a bad combo. With yard waste collection, towns will compost them and turn them into compost or rich soil: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-12-18/you-asked-we-answere....
There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them, but the city of LA reported that costs didn't significantly increase after banning them.[1]
[1] https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/08/21/redondo-beach-bans-le...