Yup. There's plenty of people who want to continue to believe in our broken meritocracy, that the (bowdlerized) Alger bootstraps tales are possible for everyone. They aren't.
There are enormous numbers of people who work very hard and get nowhere. The elements of the "Character Hypothesis" (persistence, determination, self-control / the ability to delay gratification, abstention from substance use, curiosity,
conscientiousness, self-confidence, emotional intelligence,
good communication skills, a willingness to listen, and grit) are all necessary to escape poverty, but not anywhere sufficient. Pure chance is a huge factor, but acknowledging that fact destroys the entire project in some minds.
There's a reason the Nordics have so much higher social mobility than the US does. They actually work at it:
"In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. At the top rung of the ladder, however, mobility again decreases.[10]
One study comparing social mobility between developed countries[11][12][13] found that the four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility