Isn't it dogmatic to think so. Sometimes it makes sense to rent tools.
Naturally. I've rented an mini excavator in the past to dig up stumps for a one time job. It made sense more sense to rent it since it was for a one-time task, and purchasing the kubota would have cost more than 5k.
Given we're on HN news, I thought it was implied that I was referring mostly to the exhaustion at being faced with a perpetually increasing amount of rent-seeking in the form of SaaS.
Additionally, for a lot of professional software, we aren't given the option for short term rental. For creative cloud, I pay monthly but agree on a annual basis. There's a more expensive month-to-month sub, but still you have it at minimum for a whole month.
With software subscriptions, I don't have the option of saying "I need to rent lightroom for 3 hours to edit this session." and have it be priced accordingly. No matter what, I'm on the hook for at minimum a month. On the flip side of that, since I use it so frequently, it's insulting that my only option is just to rent it. I can buy other tools outright and own them, so I'd also like to own my digital tools as well.