Lot of neoliberal YIMBYs suggesting that the solution to the problem of high rents caused by price gouging developer-landlords is...to give developer-landlords even more power. Right.

No matter how much you deregulate, the landlords are never going to build themselves out of a profit. It's literally just repackaging trickle-down economics, and like Reagan, it ignores (or rather, gleefully embraces) the fact that the landlord class is out to maximize their profits, not solve a social problem. If that means sitting on empty lots, that's exactly what they'll do (and have done).

The correct thing to do here is to massively expand the NON-MARKET housing stock. State owned, tenant owned, nonprofit owned, as long as it's non-market. It's the only way to guarantee that enough housing will be built, and that it won't price out working people. (It also forces the competition that the YIMBYs just assume exists in a vacuum.) Vienna is an excellent example of this in practice; two thirds of the city's housing stock is non-market and it's one of the most affordable cities in Europe (especially if we account for like, whether you'd actually want to live there; we're not counting Pripyat here).