But that's not the question. The question is do those things make for greater human thriving and fulfillment? Increasing things that people find pleasurable does not necessarily have this effect. As a simple and extreme example, consider heroin.
I read a lot of old stuff, with a focus on anything I can find from regular people. I used to think like you do. I'm much less convinced nowadays that we've really made people's lives better in a meaningful, non-material way, excepting a very few examples that GP already alluded to (e.g., reduction in infant mortality, which accounts for virtually the entire life expectancy increase since 1850.)
The scientists and engineers that work insane hours at SpaceX are probably looking for something like that.
But in the past, for most people, life was merely a struggle to survive, that they lost sooner rather than later.
It's really hard to say what's "better" in any sort of objective and quantifiable way; but it seems to me that by making the basics of life very easy we've sort of lost something along the way.
After all, playing a game that's so easy that it doesn't provide any challenge isn't much fun either, right?
No, it doesn't, this is just one of those banal transcendental platitudes that gets repeated enough to where it sounds like it's some sort of objective truth. Like the one about how "life only has meaning because it is short and ephemeral". By that logic an aborted fetus has had the richest life of all.
Life's meaning is ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. We all derive meaning differently, there is no universal solvent.
There is a very good reason why people want to go from poor countries to rich and not the other way around. Poverty is not fun.