This kind of 'reasoning' makes my blood boil. I've told this story a million times, but here it goes again: I was once in Puno in Peru, at the shore of lake Titicaca. It's a famous tourist attraction, where 'indigenous' (I loathe that word) people used to live on floating 'islands' made out of reed. The story that is portrayed to the tourists is that they still do; as happens with many of that sort of travels, I was surrounded by obnoxious 'embrace other cultures' idiots who were saying how great it was that these people still lived like they used to, and how much better it would be if we (= in the West) would also do so, and how 'authentic' it all was.
Well, we were on the first boat of the day, and along with us rode a bunch of 'indigenous' people with reed skirts who had missed their boat to the island 45 minutes earlier, because they were living in Puno in a proper house where their kids could play soccer and where they didn't have to fear at night that the very house they and their children were sleeping in would sink from right under them. While a bunch of rich white assholes (disclaimer: I'm white and by most global standards fairly rich, I guess, although I think that most of the time I'm not an asshole) were proclaiming how 'authentic' living on a reed boat was, these people who were actually living that life decided that they would get out of it as soon as they could.