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The issue I see with comparing median salary to median rent for a one bedroom is that tons of people (especially young folks just starting out) want to live in desirable places and are willing to share living costs in order to do so. So even if you could magically reset a desirable locality to have comparable median rent and salary, very quickly rent would exceed salary as people that really can’t afford it move anyway.

And if you instead pin salary and say that the median salary at every company must be $X, rents will increase for the same reason.

I suppose you could ban living with roommates, and require median salary at every company to equal some state mandated number. I don’t think that will go well for anyone but you could.

It's also a problem because the median tells you nothing about who goes without. For that you need to know the distribution. Bottom 5% of housing cost vs bottom 5% household income is more informative.
you're saying people look at gross income to determine if someone can rent a place rather than net ?
This is common practice across the US and the rule-of-thumb 40x generally tries to take most cases into account. i.e., 40x after taxes and other typical debt levels is "risk appropriate" for landlords... Though don't get me started on how this reduces landlord risk to a level where they should not see profits...

It does seem odd though when you consider one person with 40x may have a completely different net than another.

Just off the top off my head I can think of

1. student loans 2. alimony 3. child support 4. back taxes to one or more governments

that can cut the net income of someone in half quite quickly

It's just a heuristic to determine basic qualification: it's up to the renter to determine what they can afford once they're basically qualified.
Yup!
Yes