You're free from the task of maintaining and securely storing the thing. My biggest personal switch has been selling my car. Granted I live in an urban area where the dollar and time cost of owning a car are greater than otherwise, but I REALLY don't miss worrying about parking tickets, breakins, this and that funny sound coming from the motor, etc. Dollar wise it's been a wash.
If you own a car and a house, you're pretty much stuck where you are.
I think in any situation, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck you don't have freedom. A prerequisite to any kind of freedom is the ability to live well within your means and save a lot so that you're insulated from financial setbacks.
If you can't do as you please with the things you buy, there is less advantage to owning over renting. The responsibilities involved in ownership start to look like rental contracts and terms of service agreements.
If I stop paying the average per-mile maintenance and operations cost for my car, it runs out of gas or breaks down. It is sometimes cheaper for me, with my own car, to rent one anyway for a long road trip, because they rent it per day without a per-mile surcharge, and that's just money paid now that does not get spent at the mechanic later, and could be recovered on resale or trade-in.
You really have to look at each rent-vs-buy decision on its own merits. It makes sense to own your DOCSIS modem, your underwear, and a cast-iron pan. All the other stuff is debatable.
Renting the exact same stuff for the same period of time still gives more of one kind of freedom: flexibility. You can usually more easily get rid of that stuff, and you're usually less responsible for it if it breaks, etc. Yes, there's usually a higher financial cost for that, which is less freedom in another sense.
But the reality is that renting often means just paying for the time that you're using an item, instead of paying for it forever even if your utilization window is small. So jumping in an uber for 20 mins a day instead of owning a car 24/7, or renting a movie for 20% of the price to buy it, which might make sense if you're only going to watch it once or twice, etc.
In nearly every case over time, you'll pay more to rent it than own it.
UK: I'm just old enough to remember visiting a great-grandmother who lived in a cottage without electricity and who regarded the cold water tap and separate water heater as luxuries. And the great aunt who still cooked on a range. Their houses were dark and sparse. Both paid rent for their houses by the way.
