Of course, if you want the latest health care advances, new housing and other things, that costs more money, so growth helps pay for those things that otherwise would be unaffordable.
But are you arguing their lot has gotten worse in an absolute sense? Or just a relative sense?
And no, capitalism does not require constant growth. The very specific subset of capitalism we practice does. Imagine a small world, an isolated island with strictly limited resources. You could easily run that on a form of capitalism, just with some corrective controls against certain tipover states.
Perhaps some very "purity"-focused form of capitalism would inevitably be in the growth-requiring subset, but nobody really does pure capitalism. A lot of people like to pretend they do, but that's just that: pretension, or fooling themselves.
Also because there are lots of significant debts around (at country/state/corporate/personal levels) that for sure will not be ever repayed if there's not a growth (or jubilee) mecanism somewhere.
But indeed, "growth" depends on how you define it, on what you value, what equivalences you define.
Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable". Without constant growth, capitalism eventually fails. Unless you're for abandoning capitalism, you can't abandon the focus on growth.
I am for abandoning the focus on growth, and therefore also abandoning capitalism, but there are lots of people who don't want to abandon capitalism, a lot of them the same people who hold a lot of power and connections already, so it's a uphill fight.