Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the area and see lots of desert with strips of green
https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
Okay, we'll give Nevada a participation award for "green in color". Maine wins the "green in color" category by a lot. It's orders of magnitude greener.
"Green" isn't everything though. Nevada has a lot of brown going for it!
Oh, Maine also has a tidal coastline of 3478 miles, but Nevada is landlocked. Nevada does have a couple of big lakes though.
That said, if I had to choose between Nevada and Maine for a getaway, I'd choose Maine.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
They are definitely driving up electric costs for residential customers, though (along with EVs and heat pumps) which is a major problem.
Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
or…have you never been?