Gonna attempt to short circuit the "you think WE have it bad? Whatabout 1700s?" argument by adding that the "broken interface" theory may be much more about the patient's perception and confidence of the trap we're in than the actual truth of relative conditions. There also might now be a greater philosophical understanding of the global picture than the average person back in the day. Back then we didn't have an internet to give us rigorous detail on both the widespread extent the human race is trapped in a broken system and the futility of the common man's attempts to change it. Even if this wasn't true (I'm hard pressed to find a more optimistic take, though I'm always searching and fighting for it - technology is the best hope imo), it is an easy perception to fall into, especially for anyone already a few steps into depression. It's a reasonable bet that even if people in the past were just as likely to get beaten down and depressed about their own lives, they still might have been able to look at the world around them and the future of humanity and see optimism and hope that the next day might be better/luckier. The world was also much more malleable at the local level - both politically and individually (i.e. go outside and chop a tree down) and less of a complex leviathan of laws and exploitations which immediately instills a feeling of being trapped in the jaws of something that you can't even explain or understand.

Alternatively - or just, adjacently - with the internet (and big business, and widespread university education) we are culture-shocking vastly more people into a medium that can barely be understood from a detached intellectual and philosophical perspective, and is almost impossible to fathom from historical, traditional, ancestral or biological ways of understanding (the way humans operated for vast majority of our existence). We have little history to compare this new way of life to, and it's unsurprising if it's doomed to breed mental disease by its very nature. We have awakened far more people to an absurd reality, and "what is meaning?" is no longer just a question for a tiny group of overintellectual philosophers. Some of those philosophers say that one must walk through the valley of the shadow of death before we can find that answer for ourselves - but even they're gonna admit that a whole lot of people are gonna get stuck in that valley for a while if you just throw the masses in like we have. Hopefully that's just a temporary growing pain of our society as we gather our strength and do better but - time will tell!

(P.S. rich people are just as trapped in this malaise of meaninglessness. They have more agency, sure, but they're also still part of the systemic trap and unlikely to have much better answer on how to change anything than the common man. Only so long even a rich person can hide in hedonism before the depression catches up - or they just embrace the cold reality and adopt the "I got mine" attitude which said system is naturally inclined to. Depression may very well be due to our moralistic social being nature chafing with a cruel capitalist system which has won by almost every measure possible)