The basic design of lawns doesn't need to change: a relatively cleared area around a house. The exact composition of the lawn can change, though. Why does it need to just be some genetically modified grass that provides nothing? Let natural grasses, clover, and flowers take over.

I'm pretty convinced HOAs are causing firefly extinction (among others). Better spray your lawn, i see a dandelion. Fire up the single-stroke leaf blower to push that one leaf out to the end of your driveway for the next 20 minutes.

The point is things need to change when they no longer do the job just fine.

Ok but lawns have always been bad. Their whole original purpose was so rich people could flex their ability to leave some of their land useless. The whole point was for lawns to be useless. So like, the argument of "this is the way it was 300 years ago therefore it's bad" is actually valid in this case. They were useless then, and they're still useless now.