The household who would move every time something annoyed them in a rental does not seem likely to remodel only the kitchen and nothing else between the time they buy a house and sell it. (You have to either tradeoff kitchen remodel costs against kitchen annoyances or many remodels against many annoyances, but it seems unreasonable to tradeoff kitchen remodel against all annoyances.)
In some areas, tenants pay a broker placement fee of a month's rent, plus an application and credit check fee. In all regions, tenants pay for the move costs itself. Many times you discover that your furniture isn't quite right, your Ikea-grade knockdown furniture didn't all survive the move intact, you "need" to buy a different rug for one of the rooms, you might want to have more than 0 days of overlap between the places to make the move easier (or you might be forced to take a month overlap to secure the place you want), and add some custom-sized blackout window shades to sleep, etc...
I read the above as "[an amount of extra expenses equal to] a couple months' rent" rather than literally "an extra two months' of rent checks to the landlord".
I have a dog, and after a lease ended the landlord told me they hired "experts" that said the dog ruined the carpet and i'd have to pay $1000 to replace it. Very hard to argue against without hiring expensive people as well.
To be clear, I don't think my dog caused $1000 in damage to the carpet, but i can understand how any damage may be undesirable and there is no partial carpet replacements.
This was first apartment with dog, so this was an unknown expense.
Oh let me list all the ways a landlord will screw you!
It depends, heavily, on lease agreement. Where I was, a lease is for a given period of time, often 12 months. (Not aligned to anything: literally $DATE_WE_SIGNED to that +12 mo.) Breaking the lease requires paying it to completion. On average, that means 6 months of rent. Now, if you did the work of finding a tenant that the landlord approved of, that new tenant could then take the apartment (and you'd be off the hook once they started renting).
Since I know many people think this: leases don't necessarily turn into month-to-months: legally, they could, but my landlord typically did not allow this to happen: at the end of the 12 month lease, they will typically raise the rent at which point the lease contract gets renewed: often you have two choices: renew for 12 months at the higher rent, or renew as a month-to-month at an even higher rent; IME, around 5%. Now you have to balance the likelihood of moving vs not: if you don't move, you'll pay 60% of a month's rent over the term of the lease for nothing. Even if you are moving, you might not be moving at your lease date exactly, so even with planning, if you degrade the lease to a month-to-month on the renewal prior to your move, there might be a few months were you're paying 5% more just 'cause.
Giving notice to quit usually requires, e.g., 30 days, so you'll be on the hook for next month's rent, too, even if you'll have moved out by then. This is hard to avoid, since otherwise you risk not having a home if you can't get the next play lined up.
Now, of course, if you're going to move, and you can plan, at all, then you do everything in your power to align these stars to minimize the cost, doing whatever is appropriate for whatever state your lease is in.
(In my case, we opted to turn the lease into a month-to-month, and paid exactly 2 months at the higher rate, or ~10% or $200 over the 12 month. That renewal weirdly also came with a 15 mo option, which was new; over that rate it cost $300 to abandon ship. Honestly, other factors dominated, like pay adjustments due to new locale, local housing costs, even just the moving costs. But it did occupy time, worry, and made logistics unnecessarily more difficult. We also had no overlap due to the magic of family and the nature of our move.)
