A good way of looking at the “hidden cost” of buying your home- when you get a mortgage to buy a house, you’ve simply shifted from renting your home to renting the money used to buy your home.

Since your house and that cash are (sorta definitionally) worth the same amount, which you do makes less of a difference than you would think. (And no, it doesn’t matter that the mortgage money is “rent to own”- as the article points out, a home-renter could have just as easily been putting that extra cost into stocks the whole time.)