I think there's a more charitable way to interpret their perspective, as well as that of Bourdain. Climbing Everest is pain, suffering, and a fairly significant chance at death. And practically speaking, to even try to do it in modern times you generally need to be wealthy. So why are these people doing it? Because wealth doesn't provide contentment or satisfaction in life in and of itself. It's people searching for a meaning and purpose in life.
And so when you see people who live lives that are indeed much harder, but for whom there seems to be true meaning and purpose, there's going to be some major internal conflicts in seeing them striving to push that away to pursue something that one knows leads to just vapidness and emptiness in the end. Obviously you might argue that wealth need not trend towards the end of culture, but scarce is the society with a rich culture and a rich economy. Does it even exist?
Like don't you see a paradox in effectively equating a higher quality of life and a more Western lifestyle, when in the West a vast (and rising) percent of people are drugged out on various psychotropic pharmaceuticals just to make it through day to day. Yet look at poorer cultures and it's not like 1 in 6 people are walking around with untreated mental conditions - they simply seem to be far healthier from a mental, to say nothing of physical, perspective.
So I think wealth and quality of life have a far more nuanced relationship than most appreciate. And the ostensible subset relationship (a rich man can easily become poor if he so chooses, but the other way around is much more difficult) is not so simple. Many people are endlessly addicted to things that they genuinely believe make their life worse, and that they could easily cast away, yet find it difficult to do so. See: social media. And obviously casting away wealth is going to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than something like social media.