Sure, that's certainly valid, but it's an emotional perspective. From a financial perspective I'd rather have my money working for me.
An extremely common theme heard from people with a lot of money is to get your money working for you.
Another extremely common theme is you hear from the same people is after a while they realized it just didn't make them happy like they thought it was going to.
Theoretically there is a certain maximum level of feeling good that's possible in a day. My goal these days is to optimize for that. I'm not there yet, but I can see a path to it. At some point the pursuit of money puts pressure against some of that happiness in one form or another. At least that's been my experience and observations. It's not an absolute rule but a reasonable hueristic.
If from an emotional perspective it wasn't possible to feel any better than you did, what would more money actually do for you?
IMO a lot of people need to dig much deeper on their 'why' for chasing the maximum amount of money possible. It's not 'wrong' to do so, nor am I judging anyone for doing it, I just think it's quite a one sided perspective that that should be the goal and that alone.
It's mostly about status and getting laid at an instinctive level. I realized this after already having a child, so I've technically passed on my genes and recently a vasectomy, so I can't even pass on any more genes. Yet my instincts are still the same. Chase after status, position yourself to be the fittest mate possible. We just can't turn those drives off, so once we've earned enough money and our happiness is no longer increasing as a function of getting more money at some point after that we actually hit an inflection point and things start to go the other way.
I can totally see how a roof over your head that can't be taken away from you and low AF overheads makes life feel like a breeze. That's actually worth a lot, just not in Dollars.