Do I leave the grass between the pavers and try to revive it, or remove and replace with something else?

I put these pavers in a 3 years ago and they looked great with the grass around them as you can see in the later photos. Unfortunately that didn't last long as the grass started dying. My guess is because this side of the house gets a solid 8-10 hours of hot afternoon sun, the pavers get hot and bake the ground around them, but I could be wrong and just failed at maintaining the grass. Is there something specific I should be doing to grass surrounding pavers like this? Or should I rip out the grass and extend the mulch beds to encompass the pavers? Or maybe an unknown third idea I'm not aware of? Any help would be greatly appreciated! This is zone 7a in northern NJ if that helps at all.