It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?
For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.
Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.
But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.
There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.