Eventually huge wealth inequality impacts quality of life because quality of life is not measured exclusively in cheap toasters.

For starters, look at the proportion of income that goes to rent:

https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi...

> The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income.

As inequality has increased, life has become more uncertain for those towards the bottom, because the cost of recovering from adverse life events (health crises, unemployment, etc) has become increasingly unmanageable.

The switch to the current monetary system, followed by the elimination of taxation for rich people created this. You can only prosper with compounding.

People on the bottom are just as helpless as they were before. They carry on with benefits and modest income. They get (shitty) healthcare fit free. The next two tiers of working poor are the ones that have gotten screwed.