I somehow can no longer tolerate these "back then interest rates were much higher, don’t complain so much" statements. "You" also built houses back then with 9% interest that in total cost about as much as maybe just the shell today.
You simply add the snappy remark "don’t complain so much" yourself, for whatever reason. Nobody here said that. Every era is the way it is and has its pros and cons, but that is well known, I think. The thing about the shell is nonsense, I can’t describe it any other way, just like the obvious view that "everything was cheaper and easier back then." I understand (as I wrote) that people don’t like rising interest rates lately or that it prevents them from one thing or another, but it was never different. To better calibrate one’s feeling of living in a bad time, sometimes it helps to look at the whole picture or the context, and that shows among other things that interest rates are historically low. Back then, we could only build together with the parents, but that also required an effort on our part, namely caring for the parents in old age, which brings significant limitations. I know several such cases from my environment; in our current new residential area here, there isn’t a single one [house built with parental help], here only families with their own children live alone in single-family houses. I don’t even want to judge that, but it does say something, and following your logic, I would now have to say: "How can these young people with "worse" jobs than we had back then build a single-family house today, and we couldn’t back then?" But I don’t think that way, nor do I want to, because that would be pointless and would at most put me in a bad mood on this nice, sunny day today.