> instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later.

They would have been better off. Those pyramids are epitomes of white elephants.

Consider the income from tourists coming to see the pyramids. People traveled to Giza for this purpose for millennia, too.

This was not the original intent of the construction though.