Bark mulch culture marketing - industry has sold people on out for decades. The simple act of laying down landscaping fabric harms the soil. Add to that the chemical treatments on commercial bagged products and the lifelong reliance on the addition of more bagged product... What a waste.
Finally, most of our most hated seeds specialize in colonizing bare soil. Guess what a mark mulch need approximate for weeds... Bare soil. So even if everything else worked without problems, laying down fabric to smother, Bark mulch to smother, what the surface is left with is available for colonization by weeds.
Mulching is good... Just not what gets sold to us by the landscaping industry.
To be further honest, I don't really enjoy large patches of bare growing space anyway. Here bare areas get filled with plants fairly quickly.
