Yes and no. People tend to romanticise "the old days", but the reality is that there were plenty of people who were struggling all throughout history. Reality is that we have it pretty good compared to most of history, the main difference is that most people are far less self-reliant as they were 60+ years ago. Those that are still self-reliant today are able to survive reasonably well thanks to reduced costs. The late 80s, 90s and early 2000s are largely an anomaly of time where so many people went and lost their self-reliance and instead became dependant. And it worked for a time, but it was never going to last forever.

Things have a long way to go before they can truly be considered bad. Yes, people are struggling, there's no doubting that, but it's nowhere near the struggling that even developed countries were facing pre-1960s.