[Dalewyn]

>It feels like they want you to be in debt from birth.

Not exactly. Banks want to figure out your financial riskiness, and in the absence of historical data they usually just assume the worst case scenario just short of ongoing bankruptcy.

So just having an open credit card account that is many years or even decades old and in good standing goes a long way towards your credit score, regardless if you even put any spend on it.

Inversely, if you have only have new credit cards the banks simply don't have much history to work with, and so you are scored lower.

Trust ("credit"!) takes a lot of time to build.