So whatever the "good decision" may be, this is clearly not healthy. This is really what the article is about, not whether a $30k or $60k car is better.
I think there were a few exceptional places/people that lacked both normal scarcity and social norm pressure, but even the wealthiest people worried like these things mattered in most towns.
You can't just erase the entire cultural context of people and expect them to have no worries because there's a few more years to various peaks. They are experiencing the stresses of developing decision skills for a life that probably spans after peak petroleum, etc.
We don't know how much future planning anxiety is warranted without knowing the future. We certainly know that past societies have a strong survivor bias for people who worried about the most significant life decisions they had.
A very flexible person and a turnip may both be well tuned to the economy at the moment but a less flexible person should be anxious as much for the behavioral effects of making decisions lightly on making future decisions in different circumstances.
> “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me.
Take this quote for example. If we take even a mildly evidence based approach, this is rational. Sometimes the bottom does just fall out of the economy. It happens around once a decade. It is entirely healthy to consider spending large amounts of money as potentially risky and consider the possible consequences.