Buying handcrafted artisan stuff is a luxury few can afford. I come from a poor family and I was always grateful for mass produced mediocre stuff that we could actually afford.
I'm not saying that things were sunshine and rainbows pre-industrialization, but there's some level of analysis to be done on the durability and value of a handcrafted piece of clothing, the care that goes into maintaining it, the value of a local economy, and the other side where you're forced to buy cheap items that degrade at a far faster rate.
If a town's local businesses are put out by a new walmart's ability to carry low prices, does the town truly come out ahead with those low prices? Or does Walmart simply extract more money from the town than it returns, leaving the town worse off?
Labor has never been to afford so much luxury as the modern day.
That said if you are satisfied with a pre industrial quality of life no one is stopping you from doing zero hours of work and just becoming homeless.
Where does that come from? I see it all the time. It's like there's zero ability to step outside the black and white. Either you must be totally onboard with the current system and not question the negative aspects, or you must live without dignity in the streets.
What I'm saying is we really don't need to be working 40+hrs/week in order to enjoy these advancements. People don't need to be made homeless in order for scientists who research these medicines to be paid peanuts.
Consider how you can't really get by in most of America without a car because we designed our cities to require them. It would be a mistake to conclude that, because life is harder in a car-optimized society without a car, society must be better off optimizing for cars.
Please describe the alternative. "Mass produced garbage" is exactly how we are able to feed the world. It's not some sort of conspiracy, just scarcity.
(Welfare and UBI is still capitalist.)