Wouldn't stopping the very suboptimal behavior earlier be a net good if the crash is inevitable? It sucks to be caught in it of course but returning to remotely rational of renting it to /someone/ when there is demand should help the whole long term.

The "pray and delay" logic also seems to reflect inverted causation fallacies where they think a lower rent business will neccessarily drive away other higher rent ones and "devalue" it instead of it being a reflection of the fact they can't sustain the higher rents required to pay for it.

That's hell of a question you've made here. Irrelevant to the answer (if it even exists), humans tend to accumulate debt, it's just human nature, we are incredibly shortsighted.

And under debt I mean not just financial - if you look at every organisation you will see huge technical debt, which is often less observed and accounted compared to financial debt.

So going back to your question, it may or may not be suboptimal to do so, there is no way of knowing at timespan long enough to answer the question with substantial evidence.

And if we honestly ask ourselves if we want the vast crisis proliferating at every level of our society to happen during our lifespan or being delayed to some time after we die - the answer may not be the one we'd expect.

And even if you and me are ready to jump into it in order to save coming generations some normal life - most of guys behind us have different opinion on it.