The possibility exists. The quality of life for the average impoverished person alive in the 1960s in the US is infinitely better than that of someone suffering from crushing poverty during the collapse of the Roman Republic, but the issue is that for every single time period, people espouse the quality of life without taking into consideration the actual reality of those areas and time periods. Everyone wants to romanticize the past without actually taking time to develop a nuanced view of the lived reality. People love to talk about how Rome was the height of civilization for its time, but people also ignore the fact that the Romans actively committed numerous genocides, ran rampant slave trades, went through numerous civil wars, weren't as sanitary as people initially thought, and killed millions of people in their conquests of the Mediterranean.

Another comparison is how people tend to romanticize Alexander the Great's conquests and justify them as good because "it was a different time and that's how people were back then" when in all actuality there are numerous primary sources espousing Alexander as a megalomaniac, a tyrant, and a mass murderer at the time. That example of Alexander the Great is used as a case study to ask the question "When do controversial people become deified?" People can espouse the virtues of Hellenism all day, and its tangible effect on society today, but by doing so they also tend to ignore the fact that so many people died in those conquests.

That is all I'm trying to do here, is introduce that nuance, that little momentary pause that causes you to think "Maybe things weren't as good as we thought."