This article is completely ignorant of history. Massive numbers of people have lived in dismal conditions since the beginning of humanity, in regions that would be considered rich in their time.
It doesn't sound like you actually read the article. Whether people have lived like that in former eras is irrelevant. The article talks about the U.S. in comparison with other rich democracies, and argues that the U.S. is "poor" (a "poor rich country") in a way we haven't seen before.
The article also argues that the poverty in the U.S. is likely to give rise to authoritarianism and extremism, which are less likely to occur in a better balanced society.
There are several other comments on this page that go into some of the factual errors.
I reviewed the titles and posting frequency of recent articles on the site, and it strongly pattern-matched in my brain as “content farm”, which would be negatively corrated with article quality. I predict the author’s intention is to post one article a day, and I predict that having such a posting frequency as a primary motivation is negatively correlated with quality.
I examined the author’s previous work in an attempt to understand his motivation behind writing and posting such an article; I’ve noticed that articles written out of a personal desire to communicate an idea tend to be better constructed or have a different “voice” than this article, so I wanted to understand where the author was coming from in the larger context. I only “attacked” because of the strength of the pattern-match I found.
Also, the article take care to use the word “necessities.” If those are out of reach those people are not rich.
In a nation of declining life expectancy this is something that needs to be taken seriously.