In my hippy puget sound part of the world, we just mow to keep the grass short but otherwise let it do whatever, usually turn brown and be filled with moss and clover. We started to aerate because that helps runoff.
That works fine in the Pacific Northwest. In the South, after six months, your entire yard will be an impassable jungle filled with mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, etc.
It's much easier to tame a yard in a climate that's cold half the year and dark 3/4 of it.
I live in the Inland Northwest, and I assure you what you mention is true. We have a forest, but generally the ground is brown and dry in summer, and the winters are long and hard. The Cascades are huge, and create an extensive rain shadow.
Seattle sits right next to the only temperate rainforest in the world, though. The sheer amount of plant life there is something to behold, and it doesn't get cold there all that long.
The rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula is beautiful and rich with plant life, but the South is a different beast. If you take an empty lot in the South and wait a year, it will be packed with growing things, sprawling and reaching toward the sun. The rate of growth is just insane.
In Seattle, I mow the lawn every two weeks for about six months of the year. When I lived in Florida, if I didn't mow at least once a week, almost all year, I would very quickly get a lawn too thick for my lawnmower to get through. The Gulf Coast is always waiting for a moment's inattention to revert back to the jungle that it desperately wants to be.
It's much easier to tame a yard in a climate that's cold half the year and dark 3/4 of it.