You're both right.

Having women in the workforce artificially deflates wages by keeping productivity down because of things like diversity hiring, lawfare, maternity leave, and other things nobody had to worry about back then. It doubled the amount of workers, but it lowered the average quality significantly, so now everyone has to suffer. Women can be fine workers, but we coddle them like children to the point where it rewards the bad ones and punishes the good ones.

However, cars and houses are objectively more complex than expensive than they used to be. Back in the 60s, a car was basically an engine inside a block of steel propped up on wheels. It might have had AC, if you were fancy, but that's about it. 90% of cars were abject horseshit. And as for houses, HVAC was exceedingly rare during the 60s except in the south, where it was still the exception rather than the rule. Wiring was also a joke, consisting of fabric-covered aluminum with no grounding wire, and they probably had fuses rather than breakers.

The only things that have actually gotten worse in home construction is that they so often go for plywood instead of hardwood floors, and the fact that they use siding instead of brick. Everything else is way, way better.