It actually is. You just can't be over-leveraged. The bank will give you waaayy more money than should ever responsibly be taken. Combined with emergency savings, you are quite safe as a homeowner.

And how do you bid in a market where every house has >1 bidder and banks are lending waaayy more than is responsible?

This! The housing market seems to have punished anyone with a conservative financial mindset.

It forces you to fight with the least conservative, and the banks pour on more and more credit to appropriate ever greater swathes of national surplus.

No doubt someone will say "you don't have to buy", but then you have to rent. Forever. Because they keep bailing out housing.

Yes if you stay within your limits. But if you start loading up on debt because of low interest then things can go bad very quickly. So the advice go stop saving is bad.

No. They learned that buying a house with ridiculous terms and unlimited downside is not as safe as they were deluded to believe. Even in 2008, most people paid their mortgages, and were fine, housing wise.