If you rake them up and store them to rot down they make even better compost.

I think the solutions and situations vary massively from small gardens with perhaps a couple of smallish trees to bigger gardens with, and surrounded by, lots of big trees.

We have about 30 metre long front garden with really big trees. The other year we returned home after about a month in France coinciding with the time the major leaf fall had happened. You could hardly see a square metre of the garden that wasn’t covered in a deep layer of leaves.  A bit of raking was not the solution to this.

I spent 9 years on the local council and one of my jobs was clearing the leaves when they fell in the parks/housing estate. We used tractors, rakes, and eventually, leaf blowers when the council finally coughed up for them and still had to do a hell of a lot of hand raking in areas as blowers would only blow so much until it’s too thick then it was dragging the piles with rakes into open areas so the tractors could collect them. So I know what is possible with a rake with what you can clear. And the blowers 30 years ago were nowhere near as good as the blowers you get today.

But if a blower makes your life easier then why not get one.