Banned is maybe too far, but why should we as a country allow people to have petty power over meaningless things their neighbors do? Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?
For the most part, I'm wondering about this in the context of single family homes since for homes like condos, you could make the case that HOAs are useful for shared things like roofs and whatnot. Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what's truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?
You don't have to live on the fringe; you can make a choice to live farther out. Assuming that it meets building codes for the state you live in, you can build that wizard tower if you want to.
You say that it's a choice that's not a choice, but that's only if you make a lot of other choices first; I want to live in X area, I want Y schools, and so on. I'm in the process of trying to sell a home so that I can make a choice to move to an extremely rural area, where it will be >100 miles to the closest area that you could reasonably call a "city". (There are a few towns closer, but they're all <6000 people.) I'm making that choice, and making the choice to take a pay cut to do it, because I value silence, solitude, and nature more than I value convenience or money.
As far as your idea of voluntarily signing up for an HOA ex post facto... That seems very unreasonable to me. Functionally that means that if 2/3 of your neighbors agree to it, you could suddenly have people all up in your shit when that wasn't the terms you signed up for, and your only recourse is trying to sell and move.
TBH, I think that what would make the most sense for the most people are high-density high rise condos near a city center. The idea of a house on a postage stamp of land with a 1/4 acre lawn that needs to be mowed every week, etc., is a bullshit dream that was sold in the 50s when car culture really started taking off. If your condos are built well--concrete slab walls and floors to deaden noise--you're not really losing anything over moving out to the 'burbs, but you're gaining more time in the form of shorter commutes. Unfortunately, the way taxation and zoning works, it's cheaper to pave over a farmer's field in an unincorporated area and build a lot of low-quality cookie-cutter houses than it is to build condos in the city.