That way, even if you were subject to feeling guilt over not providing the very best of everything, you can satisfy it this way.
"good enough" and "justified" must consciously and explicitly include some pie slice for "non-essentials" though. Some amount of "non-essentials" are in fact essential. Anything else is simply not living. So, once in a while, you do splurge on the expensive weekend.
There probably is a point where "best available" isn't worth it, but I think for many people, they still feel that they need to do whatever they can. NYC is a great example, where unless your kid makes it into Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech or equivalent, many higher income parents feel compelled to move to the suburbs. Or even the current uproar where they diminished the testing to get into those schools.
The most obvious and probably biggest expense item (at least in the US) would be tertiary education, but having been out a few years I don’t really notice what the additional benefit was of top-tier private university vs cheap state university, since I know plenty of state schoolers making FAANG money and plenty of Ivy Leaguers struggling to find jobs.
Though at least for me the primary/secondary property race you describe was not an issue, since I went to school in NYC, which has district wide school choice for middle school and universal school choice for high school. (NYC is a million kids so the city is split into districts for ease of administration.) Elementary school was geographically defined, but I also went to a school with a C rating, and plenty of people from that school ended up fine.