All badges are not the same. Some are memes like you said and others are meaningful. The meaningful ones are from events or services that I've attended to or subscribed to or paid to use like Nostrica or early adopting a paid relay or being an early adopter of Nostr Plebs. It's all about who assigns the badge that makes it meaningful.

For example: Anyone could copy the Nostr Plebs badge and reissue it, but it would only be meaningful if it's from the official Nostr Plebs account.

NostrGram has badge management. That's the only client I believe? Snort and Amethyst both show them, but both do not allow badge management.

I always visit badges.page to accept them.

Basically, if someone gave me a badge, I accepted it.

Thunder Games also assigns badges similar to Achievements. I have a few of those.