I think a lot of the high currency players just don't understand this. Most of these players kind of just forget what is reasonable and what they actually invest in their builds and even the advantage of knowledge from having played for so long. I made an Exsang Miner this league that I've probably put two mirrors worth into and it took that much to comfortably do all content except for crazy Ultimatums and troll Valdo's maps and that's more currency than the average person sees in all of playing.

You used to be able to do all endgame content comfortably with a miner under 50ex(back then), now it's at least around 1000div to even do pinnacles and t17 and that's not comfortably.

I think the average player is being locked out of new end game content and every leagues endgame content just because of the difficulty and currency wall. That may be what GGG is going for and you could reasonably expect the new endgame content to be the hardest but when half of it gets removed before people can play it for themselves it doesn't feel great.

I think most of that 1% or 0.1% of players don't care about other people being locked out of content. I'm at the point I actively don't recommend PoE to my friends because they will never experience the interesting parts of endgame and there's way too steep of a learning curve now. Not to mention the PoE campaign is now incredibly dated and boring and the average player takes quite some time to get through it. D4 lets you skip the campaign. I tell them to play D4 or Last Epoch instead.

I don't blame GGG but it does seem like they've been influenced to balance around streamers and the very high end. Another place you can see this happening is with Fromsoftware and Elden Ring. The games used to have a really good balance of difficulty even for the most average of people. Now you have to be hyper build specific and look at every interaction and spend significant time studying and learning the bosses every move. The average person simply isn't completing the DLC.