a good 95-99% of homes around me are in HOAs.

In case anybody is wondering why that is, it's because local governments heavily encourage developers to establish them in order to shirk their responsibility to maintain public infrastructure and shift that liability onto the homeowners more directly (compared to paying for it through taxes). This is necessary because single-family houses are revenue-negative and bedroom communities without a substantial dense (i.e. tax profitable) downtown can't afford to subsidize them in the long run without going bankrupt.

In other words, all these suburban neighborhoods of single-family houses are ticking time-bombs that will devastate somebody's finances in a few decades when the streets need to be repaved. The purpose of HOAs is to make sure that that "somebody" is the homeowners themselves in order to contain the damage.

The real issue is that forcing development to be low-density and therefore financially unsustainable is fundamentally the wrong thing to do to begin with, and forcing people to be subject to capricious privatized HOAs is just the shit icing on the shit cake.