it’s easy to just clump everyone into a single category and then point at it and say ‘that box bad’. it’s also a mental shortcut our kind has taken throughout our history and, for better or worse, it has served us.

the alternative would be to actually take a step back and do some thinking instead of just agreeing with the hivemind. that takes effort, and it’s significantly harder to find someone to agree with you on a fine-tuned idea. hence ‘me smash landlord’. it also introduces the risk of becoming to trusting and getting burned by a bad landlord you would have judged as good. human adversity to risk plays a big part in favouring heuristics as well.

it’s way easier to catalogue the kind of landlord you present here as a corner-case, no true scotsman, in order to prop up the general idea. for what it’s worth, I don’t think anybody is doing it out of any explicit form of malice.