It gives stakeholders (dao participants, aka users that are more involved), a say in the direction of the project.
A basic unincorporated association would be enough. Perhaps a (limited liability) company if you wanted the entity to have legal personality.
I'm sorry but the HN crowd is seeing a huge shift right on from of them and completely blind to it. It's the same mindset as people dismissing the internet saying you can just send messages to people through the mail, or you can get information from the library, and taking about how unusable the internet is even though it's been in development for 20 years, etc.
I don't know about you, but I'd hardly call updating a membership list held by the organisation itself "a bunch of paperwork". It's about as simple as record keeping gets.
I'd argue that maintaining all of the crypto mechanics of a DAO is a lot more work than updating a single database table!