These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.
Losing your job & health benefits for much of the middle class would be a death sentence regardless if they bought a 35k car or a 10k beater.
The trade-off between non-existent luxury is most visible in Europe. We get small flats, mostly. The choice is between way too small inconvenient flat, inconvenient location that forces hours of commute or being already rich.
The flats these days are much less luxurious than older post-war ones, and way smaller. Then again families were even twice as big and multigenerational, but flats were even 5 times bigger. The better furnishings these days slightly help but not enough.
Then again, there tends to be public transport that works, except in USA. So maybe you could get away with a bicycle commute if your health allows it. Not quite yet in most cities though.
An emergency fund of 10k barely covers the 8k average deductible for a family. Ignoring things like rent, food, etc, all rapidly increasing.
To have a worthwhile emergency fund is too costly for most americans. Might as well finance a car - it won't matter.
"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.
Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)
If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.
Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".