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Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).
(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)
I think the thing about the setting of Harry Potter is that almost all fantasy (whether by male or female authors) is written by worldbuilding autists who have a 2000 page lore codex / community wiki either in their head or on paper before they finish the first half of the first book. Rowling isn’t like that, she didn’t and doesn’t care about canon, the setting and its internal consistency and its rules were not hugely or even at all important to her except in the vague sense of what ‘felt’ right, she is not in that Tolkien tradition, she’s more like earlier authors of fairy tales, maybe. Personally I like that quality, it makes the stories feel quite different to most other fiction in the genre, lends it almost a surreal feeling.
The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.
Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.
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I loved the fact that she tried to dip into things that were more serious with Goblet of Fire, things became far more "real" with the introduction of other schools, and I thought the length was more appropriate to what would happen in a school year.
That said, I've re-read Philosopher/Sorcerer's stone at least 6 (?) times and Goblet of fire ~3. The later books I've probably only re-read once. I don't think you can beat the first one all-in-all.
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