1. House prices have risen consistently for the past ~50 years. This is an anomaly (various theories why, my favourite is because women entered the workforce so the income per household increased and we spend as much as we can afford on housing). If/when house prices stop rising consistently then buying doesn't look much better than renting from a financial perspective.
2. Existing laws tend to favour the landlord over the tenant. In countries where this is not true (e.g. most of Europe) and the tenant is favoured, then renting is not so precarious and has lots of advantages.
I lived in rented accomodation in Berlin and it's a completely different experience from renting in the Anglosphere (UK or Australia for me, I don't know about the USA).
Obviously the case near me where the mortgage payment on a house would be $2600/mo but the rent for the identical one next door is $2000 is going to swing heavily toward renting, but there’s more to it than just that.
Maintenance is huge and real and people just seem to ignore it on the “own” side, but 5-10% of the value of the house a year in maintenance isn’t unheard of.
I assure you I am not paying ~$30k in maintenance on my ~$400k house every year... that would be comical
Maintenance items add up, and some only happen every 20-30 years, it can hit hard. A new roof every 30 years at $10k is already noticeable.
That'd be $333/year averaged out, two orders of magnitude away from 30K/year example of OP.
If houses really consumed 5-10% of the purchase price on average per year, people wouldn't worry or talk so much about roof replacements; they'd be just other drops in the bucket.
That's actually pretty much unheard-of (unless you specifically bought a very cheap fixer-upper with the intent of remodeling).
I've owned current house for over 25 years and I have not spent 10% of its value in maintenance even if I add up everything over the 25+ years! Let alone every year!
I think those figures point towards buying being favored, especially if the mortgage payment is PITI, but even if it's principal and interest only, I think buying is likely to be better in the long-term if the spread is that small.
Maintenance is not going to run 5% of the purchase price on average, except in the most extreme low-cost housing situations. A house that sold for ~$500K (as would be implied by a $2600 mortgage payment) is not going to cost $500K in maintenance over the next 20 years (as 5% would imply) and certainly not over the next 10 (as 10% would).
You may have an individual year that's over 10%, but that's a cashflow issue not an overall cost issue.
The advantage of renting is the flexibility, lack of commitment to a specific house or area, and the lack of need for a large upfront sum (in this example, renting might need $6K upfront [$2K of which is the first month's rent], while buying might need traditionally $100K to avoid PMI or ~$20K on an FHA first-time buyer mortgage and associated transaction costs).
Land, driveway, number and quality of fixtures, electrical hookups, cabinets, countertops, doors, clearing land, water, sewage, etc can be nearly identical costs for a 1,000 sf or a 3,000sf home. Many things like wall insulation and heating demand increase sub linearly with square footage.
Which is why home builders so heavily favor large homes by historic standards. This is slightly less true of high rises, but making the building wider doesn’t require more elevators, internal hallways, etc.
Building smaller (specifically reducing square footage, baths, and kitchen amenities [which are a mix of size and non-size elements], and using less land [going up, sharing walls/roofs, etc.]) is the mechanism by which the goal of less expensive can be met.
Amenities on the other hand can literally 2X+ the cost of a home.