Ya that's totally all true. But, to my understanding, you can use college loans to pay for living expenses, and you can also get a part time job. Having a part time job through college used to be quite common.
I don't doubt that it's substantially harder for people who lack financial resources, but it doesn't seem that much harder to me. It seems well within the realm of ordinary stuff that is is a bit more difficult. I admit that maybe there is an aspect of it that I don't understand, but what I see here is both you and this guy seeming to say it was difficult, but then you both managed to do it.
My perspective on a lot of this is that there is a whole generation of kids who went to college with the promise that what they majored in was irrelevant - that they should pursue their passion and things would just work out, because the important thing was going to college. So they majored in things like English, Philosophy, and Psychology. And then they graduated with those degrees expecting the world to pay them a comfortable six figure salary. Except that nobody wanted those skills. Even worse, they took on debt to do it. So upon graduation with a fine mastery of medieval English literature, they found themselves saddled with debt and no job prospects.
People like you and the other guy in this thread, on the other hand, did exactly the right thing. You took on a level of debt that was commensurate with the earning power of the degree you obtained. That's how this is supposed to work. You look at the value you can get out of the degree, and you compare that to the cost of obtaining it, and if a > b, you do it. That worked out for you not because you were lucky, but because you made the right decisions and you put in the effort required to realize the benefits.