I'll start by saying that I absolutely don't mean to diminish anyone's personal circumstances. Being poor sucks.

I think one thing that a lot of these kinds of articles miss is that this is predominantly an American perspective. The US (and to a lesser extent Canada) seem to have had a disproportionately better quality of life in the past — I see a lot of anecdotes about how someone's grandfather was a postman and they had 7 kids and 2 houses and a boat and took 3 vacations a year, etc. and all on one income. This is absolutely not how it was at the same time in the UK, for instance.

I'm a Gen Xer, and in the mid 90s I was a software developer for a decent-sized company in London, and my ex-wife was a university professor — but we still lived "paycheque-to-paycheque". I was 30 and she was 35 when we had our Gen Z daughter. If anything I'd say she and her husband are doing as well or better than we were at their age — decent house, far too many TVs, 2 cars, pets, recently got married (with a much bigger wedding than I had) and thinking about kids. Maybe the difference is that they're in Canada.

I hate to say it, but I think this is the US catching up with the rest of the world.