I think to get a general idea of how much this might be true, consider taking a person who was just barely surviving in society two thousand years ago. Show them the modern world. Ask them how much of it is Veblen.

We don't see it because we're immersed in it. To that guy, everything we do is gold-plated and incredibly decadent. We are far, far beyond creating and exchanging things simply for survival.

The richest people don't even create or exchange things of any substance. A guy plays basketball, makes ten million a year. Somebody writes a best-selling book, never has to work again for life. These things would have made no sense to the overwhelming majority of people just 150 years ago.

You could almost certainly go back only 200 - 300 years.

Hell, in France of the 1950s, the majority of homes outside Paris didn't have indoor plumbing.

(Consider, as a corrolary, that a major cause of building failure is moisture-induced rot: if you want to risk-mitigate your construction and reduce a major source of failure, you'll consolidate plumbing either outside the structure, or to a subsection of it which is particularly immune to rot.)