Something tells me there are 100x as many cute country villages in the UK as there are in the US. Here if it's not a big city, it's a depressing shamble. The exceptions are insanely expensive retreats for the rich.
The country is full of places like this. Sure, there is blight and both urban and rural decay, but there is also much to like.
Driving along the coast in Maine would be a really long trip
Visit a hamlet in the UK some time, tell me what you think then.
I would nevertheless agree with the parent to whom you are replying that they are the exception, not the rule, and much of rural America is depressed or just a whole lot of nothing, at least from the perspective of charm. Most places there, too, are built at automobile scale, and lack sufficient sense of placehood or definition to qualify as anything like a hamlet in the European sense. It's just a ZIP code with a Circle K, a church, and a some houses scattered over an obscenely large area that can only be traversed by car. Sometimes, boarded up historical relics are included, although you may have to drive quite a bit from the civic centre (the Circle K) to find them.
Food deserts, in which the Circle K feeds a massive radius (along with perhaps a Dollar General), are the norm. Getting from the Circle K to the Dollar General requires a car. In between, there's not much.
There are some delightful exceptions, and I love to visit and capture their splendid sights and sounds. They are few and far, and I find the parent's generalisation highly valid, at least as the Sourheast goes. I grew up in the Midwest and had a similar sense there. Perhaps the West Coast and New England are quite different, and it sounds like they are. "Flyover country" has little to recommend it in the whole, however, and there's a reason they call it that.
But one of the elements of "charm" is narrow, walkable streets, and _those_ are rare in the US outside of New England. Where they once existed they've often been bulldozed.
https://www.strongtowns.org/ talks a lot about what makes towns great and as it turns out those characteristics also tend to make them charming.
I live in a college town (Athens, GA). It's okay, if you're 19 and like drinking.
California especially has a large number of these.