>>Renting is not credit because you don’t get the thing all upfront and then pay for it later. If fact if anything, the renter is giving the landlord up to one month of rent as credit because rent is usually due on the first of the month in order to be able to live there that month

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a lease works, you are equating it to something like a prepaid phone bill, and that is not at all what a lease is

You are obligated the pay the full amount of the lease, if you up and move in the middle you still owe the landlord the full amount.

The property owner would run a credit check for the same reason as a lender would, to judge if you are responsible person that would repay this obligation under the terms of the agreement, it far closer to a loan then you seem to want to give it credit for.

Further the use of credit scores and other background checks only become more important the harder it becomes to evict bad tenants

Something that "there is an ongoing equal trade of values between both parties." would be terminable by either party the second that value proposition changes, this is not the case with Rental property where the interaction is governed not only by the terms of the lease but layers of federal and local laws

>If I ask a bank why they denied my loan, they won’t tell me about the specific activities I’ve done that prove me un creditworthy

If you scroll to my other comments I advocate for changing that, I am a big advocate of personal data ownership and believe any person should have the right at any time to request all data any company collected about them.

>> (sometimes I can press to ask what they can see on my report and if they’re feeling nice they may tell me, but they don’t have to).

You have the right to get an annual credit report from every credit agency every year, that is would they would see

>The fact that there’s no party you can ask to just evaluate ahead of time what the result will be, or to see what i can do to get myself above the threshold, so the individual is always at a disadvantage of information asymmetry, is what makes the system bogus.

Yes and no, there is 100% guarantee nothing is in life, but there are several ways you can get a good fact based analysis of your general credit worthiness, can it predict if a given institution would grant you a loan... no. but it can predict if you have a good chance at some institution giving you a loan.

The lower your general score obviously the less reliable these tools will be, If you have a FICO of 810 + provable long term income then chances are anyone will loan to you, if you have a FICO of 620 well that become more of crap shoot and will be based on many other factors than just your credit score, similarly if you have a high FICO score but unreliable income (self employed) then it also becomes more of a crap shoot.

>>If I’ve been burned by this as a high paid tech worker with just a couple of mistakes in my autopay settings in the past

I hear stories like this often but this is not my personal experience. Not saying it cant happen but companies I do business with do not insta report you if you autopay fails...

You have to be 60+ days over due before it shows up on the credit report... and with all the modern alerting and other tools I fail to believe that a "simple auto-pay mistake" is what caused one to become 60+ days delinquent on a payment