Even if one were to not go as far as to support a universal basic income, I don't see why it's not a goal worth striving towards if we can afford it, or at least finding a happy medium. For example I envy that higher education in Europe is free, and in countries like Denmark the government will even pay college students a "basic income" to cover their living expenses (was listening to a podcast the other day where a famous Danish entrepreneur said he used that to help bootstrap his first businesses). Also in countries like Denmark and Germany it's normal for high school graduates to take a year off and travel the world, something extremely rare in the U.S.
UBI for me is the equivalent of VC funding for all. Maybe most won't give much back, but all it takes for 1% building the next innovations for that to be a worthy investment (not that I think the humans should be reduced to profit calculators, and value goes beyond profit)
I've traveled to 43+ countries including living in third world ones. Honestly I don't think life in the west is that much different from the western ones to the point where they're disgruntled at the west or really missing out. Not everyone cares about the rat race and hedonist treadmill.
One might also guess that our generation (you're a year older than me) did not grow up with as much anti-communist propaganda - we were born right after/during the fall of the Soviet/Yugoslav Bloc and there was no need for more.
What we have grown up however is the realization that global problems (especially climate change) are growing ever more dire - and that unlike past global problems like CFC gas or acid rain, politicians not just don't do anything meaningful but actively deny that there is a problem.
That won't be enough. Not just because there are an awful lot of Boomers and post-boomers who can't even go to retirement because they don't have a pension they can live on (which in turn is a problem because all the jobs that the Boomer pensioners occupy can't be done by younger people)... but also because the status quo is not a result of Boomers being Boomers (as group of people born in the decades after WW2), it's a result of how society itself is set up.
In German, we have a saying "wer mit 20 noch kein Kommunist ist, hat kein Herz - und wer es mit 30 immer noch ist, keinen Verstand", roughly translated to "who is not yet a communist by age 20 doesn't have a heart and who still is a communist by age 30, has no common sense".
Basically, society itself has over millennia evolved into acquiring wealth and disbursing that wealth down to one's children (which up to maybe a hundred years ago meant, the male children), and it's no coincidence that age 30 was around the age where young men and women bought their house and "settled down". And once you have that house, your car, your family after a decade of education and another decade of hard work... why would you be incentivized to allow others the same status as you have now, without them having to put in the same work? Why would you risk your freedom, your job, your investment, your assets and go on the streets and riot until the elite comes crashing down like it deserves?
Of course, there are idealists who nevertheless take on that risk, and those who have failed the rat race or got left behind somewhere, but let's be realistic: the numbers alone are an advantage to the elites.
The danger that modern Western capitalist society is now, of course, that it has allowed too many people to fall behind economical progress - which is what fueled the rise of right-wing populism across the US and Europe over the last decades. And I'm afraid that even though it may seem like we have passed over the worst (with Trump and Netanyahu getting booted out of office, BoJo going down in flames, even Italy's right wing being unable to put up a candidate)... I'm afraid that the events of the last six to eight years have only been a tiny warning and we are headed for something much bigger and especially much worse.
The world needs to do a lot of change to hope to tackle the climate crisis... lots of the current standard that us Westerners are used to is simply unsustainable (e.g. always a wide selection of fresh, world-wide sourced produce and meat in the supermarket, cross-continental flights for under a hundred euros) which means that an already disgruntled population will have to cut back, and the population of poor and rising developing countries that sees the Western abundance on Instagram will not be happy to hear that they won't even get the chance of obtaining that wealth level.