Well, French laws are heavily in favour of tenants so actually contrarily to the OP, it's not that easy to rent an apartment. I'm guessing the OP has a CDI (permanent contract), has a French family name and doesn't look Arab or Black. In those cases, yeah you can get a mortgage relatively easily, you can easily rent too.

But, 24.8% of people who are employed have those permanent contract. People who do not have that, have it much tougher. To get back to the example of renting, landlords in France are scared of renting to tenants who don't pay because it's hard to evict tenants, so they often use something called a "Garantie Loyer Impayé" which is an insurance backed by the government that will pay back any unpaid rent to the landlord. But if you don't have a permanent contract, it's hard to qualify for this. When I was searching for an apartment 7 years ago, 80% of apartments rejected me because I was working as a contractor (and what's worse my income was from another country since I was working remotely). They used that insurance and that means that I couldn't qualify.

So, yes, if you have a permanent contract in France, things are relatively easy but, even then, I have a friend who is black and worked as an electronic engineer with a permanent contract but still had a hard time securing a mortgage because, for some unknown strange reason, he got rejected a lot more than his white friends.

Credit systems with clear rules like the US may be gameable but they have the advantage of actually protecting against racism, of enabling people with non-standard profiles access to credit and of actually being relatively easy to follow.