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Notes -
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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