Interesting perspective.
I was in my senior year of high school when the first Harry Potter book came out and in my senior year of college when the first film came out. Thus I don't remember any visible Harry Potter fan culture on campus. It was a bit too early on the Potter-mania timeline, and I was focused on other things.
I did read the first novel as a "beach book" one summer when I was in college, since a younger sibling had left it lying around the house and I grabbed it before heading to the beach. I liked it well enough for just one day, but it didn't leave an impact on me. I didn't go on to become a teacher or a parent, and, perceiving the series as children's literature, I was uninterested in continuing with the other books or films.
I only started noticing J.K. Rowling when she put out her infamous anti-trans essay in 2020.
It's easy for me to just refrain from engaging with the series since I was never interested in it to begin with. It would be harder for me to tell a child (especially other people's children!) that they "shouldn't" or "mustn't" read it. Different people (adults and children) are under different pressures and have different needs and agendas, so we make different decisions.
For what it's worth, many others have criticized the series for some "us v. them" tropes. What are the "mudbloods," for example, understood in light of real-life history of eugenicist rhetoric? Are the "goblins" meant to represent Jews? etc. Some people cite those as their reasons to abandon the series. I hear those warnings, and they're among my reasons, but my primary two "real" reasons for not reading Harry Potter remain: I just never make time for YA novels anyway and I'm so thoroughly allergic to the author's anti-trans comments that I wouldn't be able to enjoy her novels.
A few months ago, I read Claire Dederer's book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. It's about how we react to creators we judge as "problematic" in some way — the artist, that is, if not necessarily their art. I liked Monsters, though I thought its discussion of Rowling was a bit superficial and tiptoeing. I came down stronger on Rowling when I discussed Dederer's book. In case my reading of Monsters interests you:
