You're on point on this. It is the largest upheaval of things since the industrial revolution. The idea that most adults would work 9-5 with weekends off in a job that could be stable for years has not been the standard historically. People would work seasonally, fixed employment was rare unless you were a slave or a serf.
Right now today, and for the past decade, the reality is that two employees doing the same work for the same company for the same pay can have totally different living standards. For one of the employees, maybe half or more of his salary goes to rent, what's left after living expenses he tries to save for a down payment. For the other of the employees, his full time job is not even his main source of income. His main source of income is his home increasing in value every year by more than what he makes from working. He keeps all of his salary after tax, because he doesn't pay rent. Maybe a small fraction of his income goes to pay for the last scraps of an ancient mortgage on his home.
For the business employing these two people, it is the same. They pay the same salary, get the same output from their employees. They can't do anything about outside factors if they want to treat their workers fairly. This is also why they think "young people don't want to work" and such.
The industrial (or post-industrial if you want to call it that) economy is built around labour. That is completely gone by now. Young people growing up knows that working is for complete suckers and that a person has made some major fuck up in their life if their income depends on working.