My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.
There are critiques against rent control that have persisted for decades that are now seeing a growing body of counter-evidence that it maybe isn’t that bad after all. Hence the resurgence of rent control being suggested as a policy tool. It makes sense that the myth that rent control is bad has persisted for so long - high earning economists (yes, they’re very high earners) who are thus more likely to own rental units have an incentive to publish research showing that policies that harm their rental income are bad, and have less incentive to publish research that shows policies like these benefit the renter over the landlord.
Here’s a great article by J. W. Mason, who has a PhD in economics, who goes over more recent research around rent control. He shows that it’s far more nuanced and less clearly “bad” than right wing economists have been trying to push us to believe.