People come to the dealership and ask for certain cars. Sometimes they do ask about payment ranges, and so you tell them. If they say "oh that's more than I thought, I was trying to keep it under $500 a month. Is that possible?" I tell them if it's possible via lease with $4k down or maybe on a 72 month loan. They decide. What else am I supposed to do? Go full Dave Ramsey on them and figure out if they can really afford $500 a month?
The FEW times I tried to save someone from buying an expensive used car I just KNEW would eat them alive in repairs, it was always taken very poorly, and that's with me doing it pretty tactfully in my opinion.
People that are the type to make bad financial decisions (in our opinions let's say) don't exactly take kindly to lowly 'car salesmen' implying they can't really afford something.
Immigrants from 3rd world countries with zero formal education, zero real family experience with building wealth, save money like crazy in the US.
There's "building wealth" and there's just responsible money handling. Normal families handle money in responsible manner (have savings, avoid debt etc.) and such behaviors are passed to children. Pathological families can be doing all kinds of crazy things with their money - take up expensive debt for frivolous reasons, spend the whole salary up front and go hungry until the next one arrives, lose houses over small things (e.g. a guy in my family traded a large apartment for a much smaller one, a bottle of vodka and a dog) etc. Their lives is chaos, and that includes the financial aspect of it. A child in such conditions really can have no idea that it's not a normal way to handle money, and that it can be done much better.