Yeah, lifestyle expectations have shifted dramatically and many people have become strongly attached to consumer luxuries and extravagences.
If you watch or read older media (fiction or non), or if you lived through it, you regularly see even middle class and professional characters living with sparse conveniences in their home and going on exactly those sort of modest road trips and motel stays you talk about and many of us remember. Trips to faraway lands, were treated as a novelty that you might bucket list once or twice rather than an annual necessity. You didn't buy a new TV until the old one broke. You talked to your neighbors and borrowed each others tools. You ate out as a treat, not because you just didn't feel like cooking that day. You planned your grocery shopping around sales and strove not to deviate from the plan while at the store.
And these expectations shifted for everyone, not just incoming generations. It wasn't a generational divide and I don't mean to stir up boomer/zoomer tension -- it was a dramatic cultural shift that almost everybody seems to have adopted without even noticing.
Exagerrated consumerism and "we are all middle class on the inside" mentality was how the West distinguished itself from its Cold War villian and now we are where we are.
Everybody needs an often-unattainable and generaly-unsustainable amount of money to fulfill a life that few would have taken seriously just a few decades earlier, and the essential dissonance is producing widespread misery and angst.