Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as.

In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope