No doubt. Sports betting too. I’m a curmudgeon but we should completely unwind to the pre-lottery days when organized gambling was simply not legal.
Similarly, I love the idea of the casino aesthetic, but the entire setup is designed to fleece you and to exploit the addicted. It was better when you had to go to Vegas to experience such a thing, but now casinos are everywhere, diluting the entire thing and making it sad instead of glamorous. Maybe it always was....
If amount wagered, at typical takes for bookies/casinos/lotteries that would mean people would lose in expectation 0.1% to 5% of their income. Seems like a reasonable compromise that people could indulge in gambling for entertainment but very few people would be caused financial problems. With some weird second-order effects, but no regulation is perfect.
I used to work in odds prediction and the issue is all the shady shit surrounding betting, not actual betting itself. We very contractually forbidden from betting on any of our customers, but managers would go around encouraging to bet. This is obviously a huge problem when you know how the algorithms work, and more importantly, where all the errors are. I'd see odds on matches where you couldn't lose on a weekly basis (think 2 outcomes, average payout of >2x), open bets for things in the past (score 1:0, bets for first point still open, etc.).
The biggest issue though, was betting houses straight up banning winners. The more you won, the less you could bet, eventually leading to a ban. This is straight up illegal, but nobody cares. On the flip side, the more you lost, the more you could bet, you'd get better rewards (if you won, which you didn't) and the cheaper it would be.
You can't ban gambling, because you'll just get illegal gambling (much like prohibition/drugs). Proper regulation and enforcement is the solution here (much like drugs).
Edit: All this being said, I don't bet, nor do I endorse gambling with real money. I agree betting should mostly be between you and your buddy, but unfortunately the reality doesn't support that.