> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space
Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.
On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).
> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).