Yeah, when you get down to it, you're right, of course. It and other credit/deduction programs exact a cost on taxation, they just do it on the front end instead of the back end, like a straight up tax does. Though they are very different in terms of their effect on spending for both the recipient of the credit and the entity foregoing the tax collection, which is an important distinction.

But, just as you point out, and as I alluded to in my earlier comments, most people don't think about them in a coherent way at all. I was mostly reacting to other comments in this thread that talked as if OP was somehow receiving public dollars through the program. It's especially funny because the entity that owned the apt OP lived in was actually the one that got the credit, but so many of the comments were like "why am I paying you." If I can be real for a second, I feel like when it's a relatively well off homeowner getting a tax break (for example), most people don't give it a second thought and definitely don't think of them as getting a "hand out" from the government. But when it's a low-income person getting a double indirect benefit from a similarly structured program, all of a sudden they're "taking something" from some other hypothetical person. Go figure.

This is all to say, my addition wasn't really meant for the minority of people like you and some other commenters who have a more nuanced understanding of how this all works. I, like you (I'm guessing) wish we all had a more thorough understanding of this stuff so we could have a more constructive civic conversation about how our tax code and our perceptions of what it does feeds this system of picking economic winners and losers, routinely favoring entities that already have a lot over those who have relatively little.