I totally understand. Been on the receiving end of shitty landlords myself when I was a young man with little to my name. I'm sorry for your bad experiences, the power imbalance you described is real. Apologies for appearing callous and not making that point clearer.

I only posted my experience to counter your generalization about landlords. There are good and bad actors on both sides, and landlords can get taken advantage of too.

It seems that a small minority of folks ruin it for the larger group, who then get conditioned to treat the other side in kind as a pre-emptive defense mechanism (When in Rome...). I wasn't like most renters, but got treated the same as the rest. I'm sure my landlords had horror stories, and were jaded, so I was just another young punk to them, which isn't fair at all to me. At some point you give up. I got out of being a landlord before I got too jaded.

My experience as a landlord probably had less to do with me and more to do with their previous landlords.. To them I was just another landlord, so they're thinking why would I treat them any different? So why would they treat me any different?

The power imbalance goes both ways, and seems to me to have something to do with "having nothing to lose". I had a lot to lose if I didn't pay my mortgage to the bank, but my renters had nothing to lose by not paying me. They had all the leverage. I learned to be careful when dealing with people who have little/nothing to lose. As much as I tried to make renting a mutually beneficial relationship, it just exposed me and my finances to people with no real skin in the game.