It's clear you've never had to rent a property from a shitty landlord before or you'd know they would just evict you, condemn the property and sell the land to recoup their "investment" rather than pay $3000 of their hard earned money fixing the damage some ungrateful shit did to THEIR property. You keep coming up with convoluted hypotheticals that assume the landlord will always act in the best faith to justify a practice that fundamentally should not exist. One or two "good" landlords don't redeem all of them.

He received over a million dollars for the house in the end, plus the 5-10K in profit.

That is $3000 my dude, which is easily a single plumbing problem

If you mean busted water and all the repairs, sure, but that's on the landlord for not ever checking on their property (unless the tenant did something very stupid, which is possible)

I own my home and just had some plumbing work done in California (king of expensive) and 3k is about 10x what it cost me for a couple hours of plumber work