Maybe if you're just doing your own back garden and it's just leaf matter. But for professional arborists / municipal arboricultural teams, a leaf blower - specifically a backpack blower (battery / alkalyte | petrol) speeds up clean up by orders of magnitude.

I could understand the ban for residential use, fine - I agree just using a rake if it is just leaves, but for tree work / hedge work where the owner expects "tidy" as one of the things they see at the end of the job they're essential. Without then It'd mean an extra couple of hours on every job, which means less jobs, which means higher costs. The fine chips, the hedge cuttings and the tiny snapped twigs they take ages to clear up. Especially on gravel or grass. Fast moving air is the perfect tool for cleaning up this stuff on all surfaces.

All that being said, it is actually better to leave material for habitat and detritivores. It's really valuable, so in that regard it may force peoples hands in "accepting the mess" or as I like to say "the reconfigured habitat".

It'll boil down to "the cost", "the mess" or "the noise".

context: I'm an arborist as well as a software engineer.

And, IIRC, seems like some places are actually leaving the leafs in the gardens instead of cleaning them, and seems to be beneficial for wildlife and soil.

I find the the historic argument to be not so great, when trying to argue the current state of the world. In the 1950s we "managed" 5% child mortality rate (in developed countries). Trees are not kids, but the point is: If something has not changed for a few decades, that's probably something you would want to look at and see what can be improved.

Granted though, leaf blowers ain't it. We are way too lenient regarding noise pollution.