You can always choose to pay cash for everything you want, and eschew credit altogether, it's just so much harder to muster up the cash for big-ticket purchases

You can always choose to pay cash for everything you want, and eschew credit altogether, it's just so much harder to muster up the cash for big-ticket purchases like homes and automobiles that it's easier to game the system for credit building than it is to save for decades for a home to own. It's not that you can't do it, but that trading potential future earnings for money now is so damned practical that it's hard to ignore.