These 1:1200 are exceptional anecdotes that happen if you have some idealistic landlord that doesn't max out the allowed rent but rents it out at some price point that they consider reasonable, which is perhaps the rent from 20 years ago. Of course they get flooded with applications.

If they'd max out, they'd still get multiple applications, but maybe 10-30 of those, half of them from people with bad credit rating.

Still bad, but not as extreme as it sounds like.