A major aspect of successful real estate investing involves understanding your particular market and doing the legwork to find value. You completely lose that signal when you assess the entire market in aggregate like this.
I’m paying far less on my mortgage than I would on rent in my nice neighborhood, based partly on luck, partly on finding a good opportunity, and partly on locking in my housing costs while the rent around me steadily increases.
Aggregate analyses aside, I have a hard time believing that a mortgage will generally be worse as an investment than renting in an era where algorithms are deployed to push rents as high as possible, as often as possible.