I used to have a zombie fetish so I ended up watching ~7 seasons. I did that despite it being clear (I don't remember when - season 3?) that zero effort was being made to give the series a realistic fall of America dystopia vibe. But I get it - advertisers wouldn't have liked that at all.

Still - I sure wanted to see an HOA-brained Karen threatening to kill anybody who stole "her" tomatoes. Or what would they do if somebody killed somebody else and there's a Rashomon situation with ~4 people who have wildly different eye witness accounts. The POVs range from 100% justified to murder. I would have watched the shit out of an episode like that. The list of stuff the series avoided is endless. And...

I remember thinking that it was very apparent that the writers just hadn't ever lived outside of apartments and malls and college and shit.

It was series for redditors who wanted pure escapism. Once in a while there's some non-scary horror and the good guys fight the bad guys. It's unfortunate but TWD universe created an advertiser-friendly vision of the end of civilization and the following dystopia that many people now demand future fiction to be similar to. It's a shame TWD wasn't 100% on HBO.