This describes my brothers situation pretty much.

People also have a lot of received wisdom of how they were brought up in the burbs and just assume you HAVE TO buy.

There's plenty of markets where prices/rent are upside down and you might as well rent indefinitely.

People forget you are either renting housing or renting money to "own" housing. If you are disciplined enough to save the difference, renting can be better in some markets. Mostly its HCOL coastal cities where people are accepting ridiculously low rental yield because they are banking on price appreciation.

If you don't know if you want to be in X location for the next 5.. probably more like 10 years, there's not always a solid reason to buy.

That was where we ended up on the math. We liked the idea of owning our own home and building equity in it, but the cost was too high and like you said, we couldn’t conclude we’d be in the area in even 2 years. Covid hitting a few months after we started looking also definitely helped solidify that opinion and things might have turned out differently if we didn’t have a worldwide plague causing me and my wife tons of uncertainty in the future