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They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.
It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.
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