Yes, renting is often better than owning on average. However, as any good poker player knows, having a positive strategy on average is nothing unless you control the standard deviation. You need to have reserves deep enough and to be able to play long enough for your average to consistently manifest itself.
In lifetime investment choices the human lifespan is the major limitation. You won't be able to live long enough to absorb multiple economical collapses and surges — which indeed had always been profitable in the end, just not necessarily for you. You draw your card and you play your hand. In such circumstances a strategy with less gains but also less variability is usually preferable.
A good analogy is insurance: having insurance is always worse on average than not having one, otherwise insurance companies won't exist. Buying insurance for something small, some loss you can absorb yourself, like your phone or bicycle, is in most cases a bad idea. However, buying insurance for your house or your health is usually a good deal. You pay money to tap into reserves that are bigger than yours, you get slightly negative mean expectation with near-zero variance. Even the insurance companies themselves do it when they judge their reserves are not deep enough for a given contract — and resell parts of it to other companies to spread the load.