"it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency)"
Here's the thing, even this is an area where people will reasonably disagree.
For instance, suppose you have a couple of kids, and they build friendships with the other kids around your neighborhood. Let's say that a family with a couple of kids gets outbid on the house next to you, because the new buyer can price in the profits of putting 3 bedrooms full time on airbnb, whereas the family would be filling them with two extremely expensive young children. In this case, airbnb could end up turning a substantial amount of the SFH housing stock into hotels.
Kids are just one example of the ways people may wish to live in a neighborhood. Obviously, kids are not the only reason people might wish to get to know their neighbors and form longer relationships with them.
So these people would like to trade their right to put their house or apartment on airbnb in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Other people won't, which is why I support zoning laws that regulate tenancy length, but would prefer to see them kept as local as is practically possible.
What I firmly believe is that these zoning laws are reasonable[1] in some areas, and that people should not break the law and impose a hotel on a neighborhood that has democratically chosen to live under this kind of zoning regulation.
[1] There are clearly unreasonable neighborhood regulations that are not up to majority vote, and history is full of them.