Cars specifically excluded by the poster to whom I replied. But the sibling comment to yours made exactly the same point about housing. Should I have highlighted the quote from the grandparent post better?

Probably that would have been good. FWIW, I think it's preferable to never need financing ever, and it really ought to be only used for things that are investments (real estate, education, expenses that relate to accessing or building new work/business) and never for pure consumption.

So, I get your overall point.

The other thing to recognize is that being poor is MORE EXPENSIVE than being rich. This fundamental fact is often missed by richer (or just middle-class) folks who think that poor people could do better by saving and being frugal etc. Well, if you have no liquid cash at all, you can't even take advantage of quantity discounts or other opportunities, but you still need to eat and have clothes. A decent amount of wealthier people in our system get wealthy via taking advantage of the desperation of poor people, and until that changes, some amount of criticizing the personal financial decisions of poor folks is just victim-blaming.

I think financing - provided you can obtain it at a good rate, which of course you can't if you're poor - makes sense whenever the benefits of a purchase are expected to be spread out over time.

That's only ever true if you have other potentially-higher return investing your resources in other ways or if you're getting into talking about risk issues and bankruptcy law.

If you have enough cash to buy a car and enough left to be an emergency buffer and cover other needs and don't have something to do with that cash which promises a higher investment return than the interest on a car loan, then it does not make sense to get the financing. It doesn't matter that the value of the car to you is spread out over time. Buying the car outright is better unless you needed the money for something else or didn't have it or had some investment that would outpace the interest on the loan.