Perception can be manipulated in many ways.
People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill")
Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it.
And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person.
So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure.
The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody?
Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time?
Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood).
Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy