That's all a matter of opinion. Some people like lawn flamingos. I don't, but why should I have the power to tell my neighbor they can't put a flamingo in the yard they own? At the moment, I have a sign supporting a sports team my wife and I like. My neighbor can have a lawn flamingo I don't like, and I can have a team sign they don't like.
Because part of the agreement to buy the house includes agreeing to the HOA. Your neighbors have a reasonable expectation that their neighbors will abide by the community rules. If one wants to do their own thing, they should live somewhere that doesn’t come with built-in rules.
That's one of those things that sounds good on paper, as through it were plausibly true. It's not, of course, because HOAs have infected so much of new housing that they're nearly impossible to avoid unless you want to live out in the middle of nowhere.
Yet in other parts of the world you don't have this problem... maybe you need to teach people etiquette and "style" rather than use HOAs to try to correct people by force
You say regulate, I say discriminate. The few people who are in HOA boards have power to decide what the rules should be, and if they don’t like it then sucks to be you. That’s not regulation, that’s discrimination.
I have Christmas lights year round for a decade now, in a city but outside. I find them pretty. What's so offensive about them in a private house? And what's next? Restricting the amount of lights in the house? Their color temp?
You do you. I think they're pretty, too. If they weren't common labeled as seasonal lights, they'd just be nice-looking decoration. I have little glow lights alongside our sidewalk. There's no objective reason why mine are tasteful and elegant but yours are tacky or trashy. They're both just decorative lights.
Communities should be empowered to self-regulate.