Laws might seem to need a lot of maintenance, but unless you live in a desert and have the native vegetation that hardly grows(cactus, yucca, and mesquite like bushes), any landscaping besides a field of rocks will likely require more maintenance.
You could let your yard go back to the wild and that would be cool by me, but where I live people who replace their lawn go with mix of bushes, flowers, and trees with paths and other landscape features that require a lot more man hours in pruning, trimming, leafblowing, etc to keep looking good.
I don't live in the dessert, during the drought a couple years ago, our HOA replaced the lawn areas with some sort of low maintenance native bushes and flowers along with some sort of native grass that doesn't need to be cut.
So now instead of a weekly visit by a landscape crew of 3 to cut and maintain the lawn, we have a bi-weekly visit by a single person to do some light weeding and raking.
If you do it right, it can work out well. I just don't seem to see that in the East Bay where I live. I do my own gardening and cutting grass is easy. Pruning bushes and shrubs is a lot more time consuming per square foot in my experience but I would only mow once a month.
You could let your yard go back to the wild and that would be cool by me, but where I live people who replace their lawn go with mix of bushes, flowers, and trees with paths and other landscape features that require a lot more man hours in pruning, trimming, leafblowing, etc to keep looking good.