You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse in general.
The OP is categorically wrong about some of their assessments:
"with more and more wealth going to a smaller and smaller segment of the population while the impoverished fraction grows on the daily"
Poverty around the world is being reduced on a massive scale. There are undeniable issues with wealth gaps, but the world population is still benefiting greatly from the imbalanced amount of downstream wealth coming to it.
"The rise of right-wing and/or outright fascist authoritarianism across the world, even in countries that would have fought strenuously against it a scant hundred years ago"
The world has been dominated by these ideas for the majority of its existence. Several of the world powers still operate within these ideas, not to mention many of the third world countries, the power just moves from regime to regime. Acting like authoritarianism is "new" because the OP just got an inkling of it in their own country is pretty dense.
TLDR op just plucked a few news headlines that get re-iterated and made that their world view.
A) poverty can be reduced while inequality increases. And inequality is definitely increasing. And the assessment that inequality isn’t that big of a deal and that we should focus only on poverty is very from a “categorical” assertion, imo.
B) “the world isn’t getting worse because bad things have existed in the past” isn’t a very clear argument. I think the BBC says it best: “Nationalism has always been a feature across Europe's political spectrum but there has been a recent boom in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.”
You are allowed to be sad about the world without helping it get better, which the parent never implied they were. They're just agreeing with you that things are bad, assuming they work in tech they're probably just as conflicted about it as you or I am, so the attack felt kinda out of left field and unrelated to the original debate, which is whether things are getting worse in general.