I agree with you, and that's largely why I wanted to share my story -- to illustrate that even without any tell-tale symptoms and multiple negative test results, you can easily still have COVID.
The points raised by bigiain and mxcrossb are well-made, "cold-like" symptoms are COVID symptoms, the loss of taste and smell only occurs in some cases. CDC has a full list of coronavirus symptoms[1].
I fear that many are flying, socializing etc. when they are actually symptomatic (e.g. headache, sore throat) because they consider these minor symptoms, or perhaps they can just "hope for the best", but the severity of the symptom doesn't change whether or not someone is symptomatic.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/s...