Not to be too CR but those subjectively "pleasant" people voted by 21 points (Utah) and 30 points (Idaho) for a demonstrably incompetent authoritarian fascist who campaigned on, and delivered, the overturning of Roe. The LDS church also opposed desegregation as well as interracial marriage. It wasn't until the late 70's that they even acknowledged black people are people, too.
Despite all that, I agree with you that we all probably have something to learn from how LDS families and communities are structured. Some of my best friends grew up in the faith and while they each eventually drifted away from the doctrine and towards anticapitalism, social justice, and secular values, they found ways to harmonize the "good" parts of the culture they'd grown up in with the "good" parts of the secular world they had been missing out on.
Back to the topic, I agree with the people who say prayer doesn't accomplish anything external to the prayor, and I agree with the people who say prayer is basically a species of mindfulness which can be beneficial to the prayor for reasons we don't fully understand. In that sense, prayer is a positive thing, but when prayer is used to justify inaction or when prayer (regardless of the intentions behind the prayer) has a tendency to prevent changes that need to be made, the cons begin to outweigh the pros. So I can't really agree that prayer (or religion more generally for that matter) are "harmless."
There's a persuasive case to be made that prayers have been used to prop up a decades-long pattern of inaction in the area of gun control, which has led to the harms of nutcases having easy access to weapons of war, which those nutcases used to slaughter countless innocent people.