Why is free time still so elusive?

You can have a lot of freetime if you optimize for it by living like a monk on a software engineer salary. However its not an attractive lifestyle so say goodbye to partners and children.

The assumption was that work weeks would get shorter (15 hours / week), but perhaps it is more that careers can be shorter (work for a decade and then retire). Read: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-o...

With the modern attention economy, people having free time means money is left on the table still.

because whenever productivity increases as do expectations. so it's a race with no end and salaries don't keep up. That's how CEOs line up their pockets with 100s of billions.

You don't work hard to have a good life, you do it to have a better life than the one yesterday and the day before that. That's just how we define success as a society. An average American from the 1950s was already living better than a king from a few hundred years ago, but we still continued to work and continued to move our civilization forward. That's not a bad thing.