Being an "absentee" landlord is not a good plan, that's for sure.
I would call myself an absentee landlord. If you have a good property manager its fine. If not, you may be wondering why your place is trashed and no one wants to rent it. You pay one way or another. :laughing
The stock market is great because "you can do it in your underwear", yet if you are OK with a little side hustle and you want to grow your net worth more, I recommend rental property as part of your overall portfolio.
Since I am a lazy landlord, I have not run the return on investment numbers in a while, but the last time I did, I was beating the stock market, so bought 3 more units in Texas. :teeth
I don't use leverage/loans for investing in the stock market and that is the big difference between stocks and real estate. In real estate I can relatively safely use "other peoples money" a major principle from the Rich Dad Poor Dad book.
My wild guess is that if you have to ask, then you don't want to be a landlord. More property for us. :laughing
FYI, my regular gig is a salary earning engineer. If you don't like rental property, then I recommend some kind of side buisness for the tax deductions. W2 earners get screwed by taxes. Rich people take the expenses that they normally have and call it a "tax deduction" and reduce there taxes. I'm not aggressive at doing this, but I'm excited by the ~effective tax rate on my tax return.