Airbnb doesn't service 'demand for housing', it artificially decreases supply for the benefit of tourists.
If Airbnb was not allowed, or severely restricted in residential neighborhoods it would reduce options for holding onto a house that could be sold for single family housing.
Landlords take advantage of loose enforcement of Airbnb permitting. I have seen a landlord create a fake living space to get a permit they should not have had first hand. There is a site that uses data to indicate these bad actors working on a much greater scale than this.
If a small inventory can break supply even worse that’s an under supply issue not just demand or Airbnb.
Markets will prioritize around profitable transactions.
Are you against all tourism or travel?
Housing, like money, is often fungible. It's not something we should expect to strictly classify away into wildly different categories in every case, even if this is pretty convenient from a governance perspective.
But in actual reality, very specifically, airbnb has destroyed the character of entire neighborhoods, pushed up prices locally (if not regionally), all the while having completely acceptable alternatives for the majority of its use (ie. tourism).
So, yes, there is a spectrum in how housing is deployed, but there is also a very clear negative impact of airbnb, very specifically, in that frictionless, low risk model of renting out housing. I think that needs to be addressed, not from first principles wrt what is the nature of housing etc. etc., but very pragmatically, the gig-economy airbnb, how to channel that correctly.