I'm not big on building mounds, and never have been ... my goal at High Pointe was to build a course that didn't have any mounds, to try and balance out The Bear down the road.
But, I can certainly appreciate some of the mounds on older courses, especially the little mounds all over New England courses, which were an efficient way to use the debris from the site without trucking it miles out of town, as we do with cleared material nowadays.
The thing that bothers me in the photos above is that all of the mounds have LONG grass on them ... so that a ball that lands on them gets stuck there. I have a soft spot for mounds with SHORT grass on them, so that a ball that hits them may go careening across the adjacent green, or get redirected toward another hazard. That little mound in front of the fourth green of The Old Course is my all-time favorite.