I actually defend the Harry Potter series a lot because it was very much a kind of formative literary experience you grew up with. Like, a cultural phenomenon you had to experience in person to really understand its immense popularity. And not only that, but the books matured with you. When you were hitting puberty and experiencing things like death, depression, and sexual tension for the first time, the later books were addressing those themes in detail. That's the reason the series' quality tends to be overblown - peoples' connections to it aren't that it was incredible genre fiction but that it forms an intense emotional connection to them in their memories. For a lot of people, the Harry Potter series was what got them into reading as a kid.

My grandmother and aunt gifted me the first four books when I was like 8. I kind of ignored them for a while (I was more of a Civil War history nerd then like Matt) but my dad started reading them to my sister and I aloud before bed. Those are probably the most intimate emotional memories I have of my father. We did that for six books, even up to when we were in high school. It basically became a ritual. When the seventh book came out we were on vacation in the boonies but still made a special trip to town to buy a copy day of. I proceeded to lock myself in my room for three straight days in order to read it cover to cover. This was basically the culmination of a decade of anticipation and it really did pay off at the time.

There's a lot of positive and quality aspects to those books. But they are nowhere near perfect.