Yes, you compare it to others who do similar work. Who actually says "I worked hard... in comparison to anyone who has ever worked.". It's usually you work hard for that line of work. A software engineer can be changing links and sipping coffee or pulling 12 hours coding all day. One is doing hard work. Article seems to be arguing semantics.
Most people who make a lot of money don’t actually work very hard by virtue of the fact that most individual wealth comes from capital, not labor. Maybe you did work hard at some point to get that capital, but that’s also unlikely. After all, if capital paid out the true value then it wouldn’t exist at all. So somewhere you either exploited people or natural resources to get that capital.
Hard work sucks. It almost by definition doesn’t pay well, with few exceptions.
But we need to justify to ourselves and others why we value different humans different, and hard work sounds really good. So we invoke it to justify to ourselves, mostly, why we are superior to others.
This is a completely arbitrary way to gatekeep the concept of "working hard".
Boy are you at the wrong forum. Another possibility is that you actually created value and captured a part of it.